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i W^XaADAMS] 



VICTORINE. 



Frontispiece. 



THE 



CRADLE OF THE DEEP 

AN ACCOUNT OF 
A VOYAGE TO THE WEST INDIES 



BY SIR FREDERICK TREVES, Bart. 

G.C.V.O., C.B., LL.D. 

SERJEANT SURGEON TO H.M. THE KING 
SURGEON IN ORDINARY TO H.M. QUEEN ALEXANDRA 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 
BY THE AUTHOR. AND MAPS 



NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

1920 



X8^ 



A3 



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[All rights reserved] 



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PREFACE. 



That fervent spirit of adventure and romance which set aglow the 
heart of every lad in every sea town of England, when Elizabeth 
was queen, found both its source and its end among the West 
Indies and by the Spanish Main. 

The palm-covered island, the secret creek, the white-walled 
Spanish town formed the scene of ever-inspiring dreams. The boy 
from the grandmotherly coaster, who found his way into Plymouth 
Sound, would sit on a bollard on the quay and listen to sun- 
browned men talking of Indians and sea fights, of Plate ships and 
pieces of eight, until his soul so burned within him that he turned 
upon his own homely craft, and shipped as powder-boy on the first 
galliasse making for the heroic West. 

In these fair islands were gold and pearls, they said, as well as 
birds and beasts beyond the imagination of man. Here under the 
steaming sun of the tropics the pirate harried the sea, and here, 
in blood, smoke, and cutlass hacks his tale was writ. In coves 
among the islands he careened his ship and hid his treasure, 
in blue sea alleys he watched for Spanish merchantmen, and in 
fever-stricken jungles he rotted and died. For over a century the 
famous Buccaneers were the terror of the Spanish Main, while to 
every sturdy British lad, for all these years, the call of the sea 
rover was as the call of the wild. 

The very first glimpse of the New World that met the gaze of 
Columbus was a glimpse of a West Indian island. For some three 
centuries after his coming, the coasts the great navigator tracked 
out were the scene of a sea life whose common round was one of 



vi THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

ever desperate adventure. For three centuries ships poured west- 
ward from nearly every port in Europe, laden with arms and men, 
searching for strange riches and for a sight of the marvels of the 
new earth. 

Through the island channels lay the passage to El Dorado, 
to Manoa, the city of the lake, where the streets were paved with 
gold, and down these sea-ways, radiant with hope, sailed Raleigh, 
the dreamer, on his road to fortune. 

It was among these islands and along the Main that there 
came to Drake the strength and craft that crushed, in fulness of 
time, the Spanish Armada. Here was served the apprenticeship 
of Dampier, of Frobisher, of Hawkins, and of a host of mighty 
sailormen who have made the ocean memorable. 

It was to the West Indies that Nelson took his first voyage, 
a voyage from which the puny lad " returned a practical seaman." 
It was here that he held his first command. It was here that 
he learnt from the quarter-deck of his little brig the elements 
of war. 

In the seclusion of these gorgeous islands, indeed, the long sea 
story of England was begun. The West Indies became the nursery 
of the British Navy, the school where the thews were hardened 
and the sea lessons learned. Here was fostered and fed that soul 
of adventure and reckless daring which inspired the early colonist 
and made invincible the man with the boarding pike. Here grew, 
from puny beginnings, the germ of the great Sea Power of the 
World. 

In the proud romance of the sea, in the ocean songs and epics, 
in the sea stories which have been told and retold to generations 
of British lads, in the breeding of stout-hearted men and the 
framing of far-venturing ships, the islands have been no less than 
the Cradle of the Deep. 

Thatched House Lodge, Richmond Park, 

Kingston-on-Thames. March 1908. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. FROM THE CITY OF FOG TO AN ISLAND OF ETERNAL 

SUMMER I 

II. SEVENTY YEARS AGO 3 

III. BARBADOS 7 

IV. THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES . . . 17 
V. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND ANOTHER AT BARBADOS 24 

VI. THE ISLANDERS 28 

Vn. THE PLANTERS AND THE POOR WHITES ... 37 

VIII. THE DAY WHEN THE SUN STOOD STILL . . . . 43 



IX. A MYSTERIOUS SHIP. 



49 



X TRINIDAD 56 

XI. HOLY ISLAND AND THE FORT IN THE WOOD . . 62 

XII. ST. JOSEPH 68 

XIII. EL DORADO 72 

XIV. THE HIGH WOODS 78 

XV. THE FIRST WEST INDIAN TOURIST 8~2 

XVI. THE PITCH LAKE . . Sg 

XVII. THE BOCAS 94 

XVIII. THE FIVE ISLANDS ......... 98 

XIX. A GLANCE AT THE MAP loi 

XX. GRENADA 106 

XXI. THE FAIR HELEN QF THE WEST INDIES . . .109 

XXIL CUL DE SAC BAY . . . ' 114 

XXIIL THE MORNE FORTUNE . .117 



viii THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



PAGE 



XXIV. CASTRIES AND ITS PEOPLE 123 

XXV. THE SONG OF CASIMIR DELAVIGNE . . . .130 

XXVI. MARTINIQUE . 137 

XXVII. "NO FLINT" GREY AND THE STONE SHIP . . 143 

XXVIII. THE CITY THAT WAS . . 148 

XXIX. THE LAST NIGHT IN ST. PIERRE 154 

XXX. THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN . . . . . 158 

XXXI. DOMINICA .162 

XXXII. VICTORINE AND HER FOREFATHERS . . . . 168 

XXXIII. THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS PASSAGE . . .175 

XXXIV. ST. KITTS 177 

XXXV. ST. KITTS IN ALL ITS GLORY 183 

XXXVI. STRANGE WARES , 189 

XXXVII. THE LITTLE CAPTAIN OF THE "BOREAS" . . 193 

XXXVIIL THE ENVIRONS OF ST. KITTS 196 

XXXIX. SABA THE ASTONISHING 201 

XL. ST. THOMAS 204 

XLI. MEMOIRS OF EDWARD TEACH, MARINER . . .208 

XLIL A HARBOUR ENTRY . . 215 

XLIII. THE MAN WITH A GLOVE IN HIS HAT . . .223 

XLIV. THE SAN JUAN OF TO-DAY . 227 

XLV. THE WHITE HOUSE . .230 

XLVI. MONA THE PROTESTANT . . . . . . . 236 

XLVII. THE ISLAND OF MISRULE 238 

XLVIII. A CITY OUT AT ELBOWS 244 

XLIX. THE TOMB OF COLUMBUS 249 

L. DRAKE AT SAN DOMINGO 251 

LL THE BUCCANEERS 257 

LIL "OUR WELL BELOVED" 263 

LIII. ON THE WAY TO JAMAICA 267 

LIV. SPANISH TOWN 273 



CONTENTS. ix 

PAGE 

LV. KINGSTON IN RUINS ..*»,.». 279 

LVI. A RECORD OF TEN SECONDS , . a « . . 285 

LVII. ADMIRAL JOHN BENBOW ....... 2S9 

LVIII. PORT ROYAL AS IT WAS 293 

LIX. PORT ROYAL AS IT IS t , • . . 298 

LX. TOM BOWLING'S CHANTRY 303 

LXI. COLON 307 

LXII. THE GOLD ROAD 31° 

LXIII. SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD . , .316 

LXIV. OVER THE ISTHMUS TO PANAMA . . . . . 325 

LXV. MORGAN'S RAID • . . 33° 

LXVI. OLD PANAMA . . a 334 

LXVII. "GROG'S" VICTORY 34° 

XVIII. HOW DRAKE WRESTLED WITH THE SHADOW . . 343 
LXIX. CARTAGENA HARBOUR . . . . . - .348 

LXX. THE CITY OF CARTAGENA 355 

LXXI. OFF TO THE FRONT 359 

LXXIL THE SARGASSO SEA 363 

XXIII. THE VANISHING ISLAND AND THE GIANT WHO 

DIED TWICE 366 

.XXIV. "THE SOUGH OF AN OLD SONG" . . • . . 372 

INDEX ...•....«...• 375 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



VICTORINE Frontispiece 

BARBADOS HARBOUR ...... .^ 

MANCHINEEL GROVE, BARBADOS ]^ To face p. 7 

VIEW FROM ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, BARBADOS .\ 

NEGRO HUTS, BARBADOS J *' " 

PRINCIPAL'S HOUSE, CODRINGTON COLLEGE, BAR- 
BADOS „ 19 

MAIN STREET, HOLE TOWN, BARBADOS ... ,,21 

LANDING PLACE OF THE « OLIVE BLOSSOME," 

BARBADOS ». 23 

A PLANTER'S HOUSE, BARBADOS. A CIRCLE OF 

CABBAGE PALMS m 37 

A WEST INDIAN GRAVEYARD, BARBADOS. THEn 

SILK COTTON TREE I 

PLANTER'S HOUSE, SHOWING THE HURRICANE j " ** 

WING J 

WEST INDIAN JUNGLE ....... „ 57 

A JUNGLE STREAM, TRINIDAD . . . . .s 

ST. JOSEPH, TRINIDAD j " ^^ 

TRASH HUTS ON THE EDGE OF THE HIGH 

WOODS ,,79 

THE SHORE NEAR THE PITCH LAKE .... „ 89 

THE PITCH LAKE „ 93 

STREET IN GRENADA x 

MARKET SQUARE, GRENADA. » . . . . j " ^°7 

CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA . . . . . . • •) 

GRAVEYARD, MORNE FORTUNE j » 1^7 

SOUFRIERE, ST. LUCIA ,,127 

THE QUAY, ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE ... „ 155 

THE MAIN STREET, ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE . „ 161 

ROSEAU VALLEY, DOMINICA , ,,167 



289 



xii THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

25. BRIMSTONE HILL, ST. KITTS To face ^ 

26. BRIMSTONE HILL, ST. KITTS 

27. SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO 1 

28. FORT SAN CRISTOBAL, SAN JUAN [ " 

29. CASTLE OF HOMENAJE, SAN DOMINGO ... 

30. RIVER FRONT, SAN DOMINGO ...... 

31. TOMB OF COLUMBUS, SAN DOMINGO . , . „ 

32. KING'S HOUSE, SPANISH TOWN . . . . .y 

33. STREET IN SPANISH TOWN [ "273 

34. RODNEY'S MONUMENT, SPANISH TOWN . . . ,, 277 

35. GUNS FROM VILLE DE PARIS . . . • • ) 

'36. STREET IN SPANISH TOWN , ) "279 

37. EFFECTS OF EARTHQUAKE, KINGSTON ... „ 285 

38. THE QUEEN'S STATUE, KINGSTON I 

39. PARISH CHURCH, KINGSTON ) 

40. PORT ROYAL v 

41. FORT CHARLES, PORT ROYAL j "293 

42. NELSON'S QUARTERS, PORT ROYAL .... ,,299 

43. THE GOLD ROAD, PANAMA ,, S^S 

■44. A SQUARE IN PANAMA CITY ,,325 

45. A CHURCH IN PANAMA CITY ,,329 

46. THE COUNTRY AROUND PANAMA . . . . . „ 331 

47. THE BRIDGE, OLD PANAMA -| 

48. THE SEA WALL, OLD PANAMA ) " 335 

49. OLD PANAMA . . . , ) 

50. HARBOUR OF OLD PANAMA } >. 339 

51. CARTAGENA HARBOUR I 

52. FORT SAN LAZAR, CARTAGENA . . . ' . .] '» ^49 

53. A STREET IN CARTAGENA " t 355 

54. PLAZA DE LOS MARTIRES, CARTAGENA . . „ 359 



MAPS 

CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA To face p. 113 

MARTINIQUE , ,,143 

CARTAGENA . » 353 

WEST INDIES AND SPANISH MAIN .... At end of volume 



THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

I. 

FROM THE CITY OF FOG TO AN ISLAND OF ETERNAL SUMMER. 

London in mid-December, on the eve of the departure of the 
mail steamer for the West Indies, was a disconsolate place. 

The least woeful spot, perhaps, was Regent Street at high 
noon. The road was covered with a sour, chocolate-coloured mud 
which spat viciously from under the Juggernaut wheels of motor 
omnibuses. Above there \vas no suggestion of either atmosphere 
or sky, but merely a pall of fog as cheerless as a poor-house 
blanket. The street began in mist and ended in mist, while 
into the same gelid shadow the carriages vanished. Things 
were seen as through a glass darkly, so that the housetops 
looked like distant battlements. 

There was a smell abroad as of mildew, seasoned by the 
stench of petrol and the acrid filth of the street. The shop 
windows were steamed over by a clammy sweat. Within were 
half-sufifocated lights, for the day showed no distinctions of morn, 
afternoon or eventide. 

The people who walked the pavements kept their eyes upon 
the slimy stones. They seemed narcotised by a cold, the shrewd- 
ness of which no thermometer could register. The only sounds 
that cheered them were the hissing of wheels, the hammering of 
hoofs, and the occasional jingle of hansom-cab bells. 

The only patch of colour I can remember in this last walk 
in London was derived from a yellow and red poster dealing 

B 



2 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

with Christmas festivities. It was carried by a damp, sepia- 
tinted man, and the gaudy colours were reflected in the pool of 
liquid mud over which he stood stupefied. There was also a 
barrow filled with holly — a pile of shining leaves and scarlet 
berries — but beyond these the houses, the vehicles, and the 
people were all chilled down to the general grey of cellar mould. 

Then came an indefinite sea journey, in no way unlike so 
many others, marked by recollections of a fading port, the thud 
of engines, the scud of the wave under the ship's bow, the landing 
from a boat on a hot, white quay crowded with negroes. 

As the last association with any land was concerned with a 
walk along Regent Street, so the next took the form of swimming 
in a pool within the coral reef at Barbados. 

It was again high noon. The rays of the tropical sun were 
keen as a hot sword-blade. The sea was sensuously warm. On 
the shore, on the edge of a coral cliff some twelve feet high, was 
a bathing-hut of brown wood with warped sun-shutters, and a 
flight of blistering steps leading to the water. The little cliff 
was hollowed out into caverns by the tide, while over its brink 
hung creepers in long festoons. 

The cabin was shaded by the leaves of a sea-grape tree. A 
clump of bananas, a hibiscus bush covered with crimson flowers, 
and some acacias kept company with the hut. As I floated in 
the pool I could watch a humming-bird busy with the blossoms of 
the sea-grape, and could follow the flight of many dragon-flies. 

The sky above was the deepest blue, the sea beyond the 
reef was the colour of a pansy, while upon the reef itself the 
surf broke in a line of white. The sea within the reef was a 
wondrous green, and so clear was the watel* and so white the 
sand that in swimming one's shadow could be seen on the 
weedless bottom. In the distance, where the small cliff ended, 
there came a beach, curved like a sickle, with palms and 
impenetrable trees along the rim of the strand. The air was 
heavy with the smell of the sea, while upon the ear there fell 
no sound except that of the surf on the reef. 



II. 

SEVENTY YEARS AGO. 

A JOURNEY to Barbados in a mail steamer of 6000 tons 
provides little to comment upon unless it be the grumbling of 
the passengers. There are always many to find fault. Some 
will complain that the ship goes too fast, or not fast enough. 
Others are aggrieved because the electric fan in their cabin hums 
like a giant bee, or because the grand piano is out of tune, or 
because quails are not cooked in a manner they approve of. 

Those who are most ready with grievances may perhaps be 
appeased by an account of the journey from England to Barbados 
by mail ship as it was accomplished only seventy years ago. 

In 1836 one William Lloyd,^ doctor of medicine, started for 
Barbados with three male friends. They were simple tourists, 
travelling for pleasure, and, incidentally, for that improvement of 
the mind which was regarded as desirable in those days. The 
departure was from Falmouth, and the ship was the mail barque 
Skylark^ Captain Ladd. She was lying in the bay, ready to 
start. It must be stated that the doctor himself commenced to 
grumble from the beginning. He complained that " the demand 
of the boatmen was half-a-guinea each — an excessive charge, 
allowed by the rules of the port." It cost the tourists, therefore, 
2/. to get on board ! The bulwarks of the ship were " forbiddingly 
high," so that it was impossible to look over. Those who desired 
to gaze upon the sea had to hang over the gunwale, like boys 
over an orchard wall. The poop was not safe for tourists, 
"having no defence at the sides." 

' Letters from the West Indies. 



4 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

There was one general cabin in the Skylark for all the 
passengers — to live in, dine in, and sleep in. It was so low that 
it was impossible to stand upright in it ; moreover, it was dark. 
This was due at the moment to the fact that "the top of the 
cabin lights was covered with meat in a recently slaughtered 
state." No doubt, when the mail barque got away to sea the 
joints were removed and the blood-smeared panes of glass were 
cleaned. The tourists noticed also that "joints were hung around 
in various parts of the vessel, interspersed with cauliflowers, 
cabbages and turnips." 

Now, in this low-roofed cabin, with the blood-dimmed skylight, 
there were only twelve berths provided. The number of 
passengers, on the other hand, was eighteen — viz. fifteen gentlemen, 
and three ladies. Six of the party had, therefore, to shift as best 
they could during the month the voyage lasted. 

When the ship was well in the tropics the doctor makes the 
following note : " Our nights are sad from the skylights being 
closed, the passengers who sleep on the table, on the benches and 
on the floor being afraid of cold from the night air." That cabin 
must have been little less than a torture-chamber. A fetid oil- 
lamp, swinging to and fro as the ship rolled, would reveal the 
sleepers on the table. The heat would be suffocating and the air 
thick with the fumes of the last meal, of stale wine, of tobacco, of 
damp clothes, and of eighteen perspiring human beings. Above 
the creaking of the bulkheads there would, no doubt, be heard the 
sigh of the tired woman who could not sleep, the gasp of the 
fevered man who wanted air, and the snoring of the heavy people 
on the floor. The passengers must have hated this too familiar, 
ever-frowsy " black hole," for it is needless to say, that in the mail 
barque of 1836 there was no smoking-room, no library, no music 
room, and, of course, no bath-room. When the weather was 
unfavourable there was nothing for the fifteen gentlemen and 
the three ladies to do but to sit below in the gloom, and like 
St. Paul, " hope for the day." 

The doctor found the meals particularly trying. Upon this 
topic he writes as follows : " It is a trial to be long at dinner when 



SEVENTY YEARS AGO. 5 

one is panting for breath ; the right plan would be to dine off one 
dish and then away, whereas we have soup, then a wait for fish, 
then a long wait for a course of meat, then a tedious wait for 
a course of pastry, then a tiresome wait for the dessert, and 
long before that is finished we are wiping our foreheads," One 
thing is clear — there was no stinting in the matter of food on 
the good ship Skylark. The order of the day was as follows : 
coffee, 6 A.M. ; breakfast, 8 A.M. ; lunch, 12; dinner, 4 P.M., with 
coffee after ; tea, 7 p.m. ; and supper, 9 P.M. 

The doctor remarks — and the remark is true to this day— 
"there is some temptation to eat and drink too much at sea." 
There was undoubtedly too much wine consumed on board the 
Skylark ; so much, indeed, that it led to " headache and other 
feverish symptoms." 

William Lloyd, however, although in common with his fellows 
he panted for breath whenever he found himself in that awful 
cabin, was disposed to make the best of things. The passage from 
Falmouth to Barbados occupied twenty-six days, from which it 
may be inferred that the Skylark was a good sailing vessel and had 
a strong N.E. trade wind behind her all the way. " We had 
a pleasant voyage," writes the cheerful doctor, " though our captain 
quarrelled three successive days with his sailing-master, who was 
at last put in arrest." 

Captain Ladd seems to have had quite an ample idea of his 
position. At Falmouth he made his appearance before the 
passengers with a theatrical effect worthy of a leading actor. 
The barque was ready to sail, the last package was on board, 
the sailing-master was striding to and fro on the poop, all the 
passengers, eager to be away, were watching the shore for a 
sign of the great man who was to lead them westward. Just 
at the critical moment " the captain arrived in his cocked hat 
and uniform with the mails " — his Majesty's mails, no less. 

The Skylark reached Barbados after sundown on the 
twenty-sixth day. At 10.30 p.m. " Captain Ladd, with his 
cocked hat and sword, hastened to pay his devoirs to the 
captain of the Belvidere frigate then in the harbour.'' The 



6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

eighteen passengers having witnessed the first act of this 
impressive ceremony retired to the loathsome cabin " for a last 
stewing," as the doctor puts it While they were " endeavouring 
to woo a little hot sleep" Captain Ladd clanks on board again 
and arouses everybody with the news that " a fever was raging 
at Bridgetown." This choice information was probably yelled 
down the hatchway in a husky voice scented with rum. 

The captain having dropped this bomb into the sweltering 
hole where the tourists lay, and having made them thereby 
perspire the more, no doubt divested himself of his sword and 
cocked hat and sank into sleep, with the happy sense of 
" something attempted, something done." 




BARBADOS HARBOUR. 




MANCHINHEL GKOVK, BAKBAUOS. 



in. 

BARBADOS. 

The Royal Mail steamer reaches Barbados at daybreak. On 
the present occasion of her coming the sun had just risen, yet 
there was still a full moon shining, like a disc of steel, in the 
grey. The steamer crept to her buoy in Carlisle Bay, and by 
the growing light there could be seen an island of low 
pale-green downs, fringed at the water's edge by a belt of 
trees, with red-roofed, white-walled houses dotted between them. 
The green uplands were brakes of sugar-cane. There was no 
indication of a definite town ; no evident landing-place. But for 
a few palms and casuarina trees, negroes in boats, and a number 
of bright-hulled schooners from " down the islands," the place 
might have been a bay in England. 

As seen from the ship it did not fulfil the florid conception of 
the tropics nor the idea of a coral island. 

Barbados is about the size of the Isle of Wight, and at the 
commencement of the seventeenth century it represented — with 
the exception of Newfoundland — the sole colonial possession of 
England. Indeed, in 1605, it could have been said that the 
empire of Great Britain beyond the seas was constituted only 
by a vague line of half-frozen coast and this tropical Isle of 
Wight, for the two represented England's insignificant share in 
the New World. 

Barbados is the only West Indian island which has been 
English from the days of its beginning until now. 

The manner in which it became a part of the empire is 
curious. In 1605 a certain Sir Oliver Leigh, of 'Kent, incited 
by tales of rich lands in the West, equipped a ship called the 
Olive Blossome, and sent her across the seas. In due course 



8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

the lumbering craft came in sight of Barbados, and the sailors, 
attracted by a sandy cove and shady trees, rowed ashore and 
landed on the beach. " Finding no opposition," these good men 
from Ramsgate, Deal and Dover took possession of the island 
in the name of their country. 

The ceremony attending the annexation was unaffected. On 
the beach they put up a cross, to give the function a religious 
tone, while one of their number carved on the bark of a tree 
the inscription, 

"James K. of E. and of this island." 

The cross was probably made from the staves of a beer-barrel, 
and the graving on the tree, no doubt, was done by a dagger 
sharpened on a leather jerkin. 

It may be imagined that when the ritual was over these 
pioneers of empire bathed — for the sandy shore would have 
reminded them of Thanet — chased the land crabs, or threw stones 
at the monkeys who still haunt this corner of the island. They 
then jumped into their boat, each with a handful of strange 
flowers, pushed off to the Olive Blossome and sailed away, for 
they were bound for the Main. 

The annexation ceremony took place near to the spot on 
which Hole Town now stands (page 22), and compared with the 
pomp and glamour observed by the Spaniards on like occasions, 
the proceeding was little more than a schoolboy affair, a frolic of 
a party of Deal boatmen. 

It may be said by some that Trinidad holds precedence of 
Barbados in the matter of annexation, for in 1595 "the Honorable 
Robert Duddely, Leiftenante of all Her Majestie's fortes and 
forces beyonde the seas," took possession of that island, with 
infinite solemnity, in the name of his Queen, He nailed to a tree 
"a peece of lead" inscribed with the Queen's arms, and an 
announcement in the Latin tongue. He caused, moreover, 
trumpets to be blown and a "drome" to be beaten. Unfor- 
tunately, the island was at that time in the possession of Spain, 
and in spite of the " peece of lead " continued a colony of that 



BARBADOS. 9 

State for long years after. Robert Duddely's affair was indeed 
little more than a common act of trespass, in which he was 
fortunately not detected. 

It was some twenty years after the coming of the Olive 
Blossome that the first settlers made their home and built their 
log huts in Barbados. They sailed from England in a vessel 
named the William and John, belonging to Sir William Courteen. 
They made for the same sandy bay — by that time almost 
legendary — found the place of the cross and the writing on the 
tree. In a clearing in a forest near by they began the first town, 
Hole Town, erected a fort and made themselves masters of at least 
the west coast of the island. 

Things, however, in Barbados were neither quiet nor well 
established for many years after Courteen's settlers founded their 
little city. For it happened in 1627 that King Charles, in a 
moment of incoherent liberality, granted all the Caribbee Islands 
(twenty-two in number including Barbados) to the Earl of 
Carlisle. Now, few of these islands were in the King's gift, and 
he might as well have presented the Earl at the same time with 
the Atlantic Ocean, the Equator, and the North and South Poles. 

However, in July 1628, a confident body of settlers landed on 
the south of the island, under the protection of the Earl of 
Carlisle, and established another town, which they called Bridge- 
town, because they found there a bridge which the Indians had 
built across a creek of the sea. The bay in which they beached 
their boats is called Carlisle Bay to this present time. 

As may be supposed, Courteen's settlers — being the old and 
original inhabitants of the island — thought so ill of this counter- 
enterprise, that they fell upon Carlisle's men and beat them 
grievously. Later on it transpired that the King, when in a 
previous island-scattering mood, had already promised Barbados 
to the Earl of Marlborough. Lord Carlisle thereupon approached 
the Lord of Marlborough and found that peer (who probably had 
vague ideas as to what and where Barbados was) most ready to 
forego all claims to the property in consideration of a sum of 
300/. sterling paid in cash annually. 



10 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

It may be conjectured that one party to this bargain sauntered 
down St. James's chuckling over the solid gold coin he had 
obtained for an estate as shadowy as Prospero's island, while the 
other hurried to his ship-master to assure him that at last — and 
for the paltry sum of 300/. — Barbados was his. 

Yet scarcely had the money been counted out upon the Earl 
of Marlborough's table when Sir William Courteen forced himself 
into the lordly presence and pointed out, possibly with some 
emphasis and heat, that Barbados was his, and that he was 
possessed of it prior to 1627, at which time the generous King 
gave it away, with adjacent parts of the globe, as if it had been 
a mere bonbonniere. 

Thus began squabbles to which the cudgel play in the 
environs of Bridgetown and " The Hole " — as the scoffers 
called the metropolis of Barbados — was a small thing. 

Barbados is very densely populated. Its inhabitants number 
some 200,000, nearly all of whom are negroes.^ The patriotism 
of the Barbadians is unbounded, and in these unsentimental 
days, is pleasant to contemplate. " They cling to their home," 
as Froude remarks, "with innocent vanity, as though it was the 
finest country in the world." If they do leave it, it is only for a 
time. Many of these loyalists have been attracted recently to 
the Canal enterprise at Panama- by the high wages which obtain 
there. But the stay of the exiles on the Isthmus is short. 
They go thither in order that they may enjoy Barbados the 
better. The heavy toil and the hard climate are forgotten when 
they return to the island and can indulge — if only for one day — 
in the supreme luxury of driving through the town in a buggy, 
in a black coat and bowler hat, lit up by a necktie of fulminating 
colours. There will be then so wide a grin on the ci-devant 
navvy's face that the rows of white teeth can hardly hold the 
penny cigar. The anticipation of this one triumphal progress 
through familiar streets will have kept alive for months the 
germ of hope in many a labourer's breast at Colon. 

• The population of the Isle of Wight is, by comparison, 82,416'. 



BARBADOS. ii 

Barbados, too, is intensely and seriously English. " It was 
organised," writes Froude, " from the first on English traditional 
lines, with its constitution, its parishes, and parish churches and 
churchwardens, the schools and parsons, all on the old model, 
which the unprogressive inhabitants have been wise enough to 
leave undisturbed." 

In the heart of the capital is Trafalgar Square, and in the 
centre of that square (just as in the Mother Country) is a statue 
to Nelson. London, indeed, may be said to have imitated Bridge- 
town in this particular, for the monument in Barbados was the 
first erected to the hero of Trafalgar. In defence of the English 
metropolis, however, it must be stated — and it is to be hoped with- 
out jealousy — that this rival statue is not impressive, while the 
famous mariner is made to look bored and jaundiced, although 
he is no longer " pea green " as he was when Froude saw him. 

The city of Bridgetown is full of bustle, dust and mule 
teams, but it is not attractive. The suburbs, on the other hand, 
are beautiful — beautiful as only the outskirts of a town in the 
tropics can be. There are villas lost in ample gardens, avenues 
of palms, white roads barred by black shadows and made glorious 
by mahogany and banyan trees, by the cordia with its orange- 
coloured blossoms, by the scarlet hibiscus, by walls buried under 
blue convolvulus flowers, by over-stretching boughs from which 
hang magenta festoons of Bougainvillea. Here can be seen that 
most stately of all palms, the palmiste or cabbage palm, with such 
trees as the tamarind, the mango, the shaddock, and the curious 
frangipani, looking as bare as a plucked bird. 

On the outskirts of the town, and indeed all over the island 
will be found in rows, in clumps, in halting lines, or in infrequent 
dots the dwellings of the negroes. These are tiny huts of 
pewter-grey wood, raised from the ground on a few rough stones 
and covered by a roof of dark shingles. They are as simple as 
the houses a child draws on a slate — a thing of two rooms, with 
two windows and one* door. The windows have sun shutters in 
the place of glass ; there is no chimney, for the housewife does 
her cooking out of doors in the cool of the evening. 



12 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Such is the original Uncle Tom's Cabin, scarcely changed these 
two hundred years. More picturesque little toy houses can hardly 
be imagined, but it makes one gasp to think how many human 
beings crowd into these tiny rooms after sundown, for the negro 
sleeps with firmly closed doors and shutters to keep out 
"jumbies" and ghosts, which are both numerous and trying in 
the West Indies, centipedes, which are ten inches long, snakes, 
vampire bats, and other horrors of the tropical night. 

These fragile huts are those which are referred to in 
descriptions of hurricanes in which it is said that "over 3000 
houses have been blown down, six villages have been levelled 
with the earth, and 10,000 people are homeless." 

It is not uncommon to meet a house on the highway in the 
act of being " removed." It is placed on a cart flat-wise, like 
a puzzle taken to pieces, the four walls being laid one above the 
other as if they were pieces of scenery from a theatre. The roof 
is indistinguishable as such, the tiles are in the bottom of the 
cart, and while the owner of the residence will carry the front 
door on his head, other kind friends will assist with the window 
shutters, the doorstep and the fowlhouse. 

About each tiny pewter-grey house will be the comfortable 
green of bananas and guinea-corn, a clump of rustling cane, with 
possibly a papaw or a bread-fruit tree to shade the threshold. 
In what may be called the policies are half-naked children, some 
fowls, a pig tied by the neck, or a goat tethered in like fashion. 

The climate of Barbados in the winter is healthy and agreeable. 
The little island lies far out to sea in the very heart of the trade 
wind. That genial breeze blows steadily from November to May. 
To sit in a draught in scant attire so that a strong east wind may 
play upon the sitter like a douche is one of the chief objects of 
life in Barbados. The thermometer varies from about y6° to 82" F. 
There are no sudden lapses of temperature, none of that mean 
chill at sundown which falls like a footpad upon the sojourner 
in the Riviera. It is possible to be out and about all day. There 
is no need of any sun-helmet. The straw hat of the river Thames 
is all the head-covering required in this or any other West Indian 



BARBADOS. 13 

island. The badge of the raw tourist is a white helmet and a 
mosquito-bitten face. The one is as superfluous as the other 
when the management of mosquito-curtains has been learnt 
As a matter of fact, mosquitos and insects generally give very- 
little trouble in Barbados. 

The climate, as a whole, may be judged by the circumstance 
that the medical men of Bridgetown cling all the year round 
to the black frock coat and tall hat, which are the delight of the 
profession in Great Britain. The air is comparatively dry. The 
roads throughout the island are excellent, while the sea-bathing 
cannot be surpassed. The sky in the dry season is now and then 
clouded over, and there is occasional rain, two features which will 
be appreciated by those who have been wearied by the unfailing 
sunshine of the " cold weather " in India. The island has an 
excellent water supply, while both malaria and yellow fever 
are practically unknown. Barbados has had no experience of 
earthquake, it possesses no volcano, and the hurricane season 
is limited to the months of summer and autumn. The island, 
therefore, presents an admirable climate for those who cannot, 
or will not, winter in northern latitudes. 

While on the subject of health matters, it may be noted that 
the West Indian islands still suffer — in spite of every care and of 
ceaseless investigation — very seriously from leprosy. The disease 
is limited to the " coloured " sections of the Creole population, 
being rare in the white Creole. 

At Barbados is an excellent lazaretto, maintained by the 
Government. It is a model institution of its kind, and reflects 
great credit upon its medical chief, Dr. Archer. The lazar-house 
is situated by the sea, in a pleasant garden facing to the west. 
Around the garden is a very high and woeful wall, like the wall 
of a convent or a prison. Those who are within the garden are 
captives for life. All have had forced upon them a vow never 
to look upon the world again, for there is no way out to the 
high road except through the gate that leads to the burial-ground. 
It is a garden that sees only the setting of the sun. 

All who walk its weary paths are condemned to die. There 



14 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

is no ray of hope in the lepers' pleasance. The shipwrecked man 
on a raft may search, day after day, for the gleam of a sail, but on 
the horizon of these poor castaways there will be never a speck to be 
seen. The days are horrible in their mockery for they are nearly 
always sunny ; the trees are bright with blossoms and alive with birds. 
The birds are free to come and go, are busy with their mating and 
the building of their nests. The men and women who hobble and 
sigh and curse in the shadow of the trees have no one thing to 
look forward to but a lingering death. If the days are hideous 
the nights at least bring forgetfulness and peace. 

" How sweet to sleep and so get nearer death," must be the 
cry of each one of these lamentable outcasts. 

If all were old and had lived their lives the fate would not be 
so tragic, but in this garden of Gethsemane there are budding 
maidens and sturdy lads. Among the newcomers I saw a girl 
of seventeen. She had all the freshness of perfect health, but 
certain loathly spots had appeared upon her skin, and then had 
come — the inquisition, the wrenching from home, the banishment 
to the house in the garden. She had, a week or so ago, such a life 
before her as is dreamed of by a girl of seventeen. She had a lover, 
perhaps, but now the iron gate of her Paradise has shut with a 
clang behind her and she is doomed to a slow rotting of the body, 
inch by inch. 

She can see in the lazar-house, depicted with brutal candour, 
the future of her days. Her fingers will slough off like the hands 
of this poor woman who looks at her with such compassion. 
Her face will become hideous with toad-skin growths until she 
will be as little human looking as the dulled, distorted creature 
who sits on a bench waiting for the laggard end. She will change 
to a thing as repulsive and gargoyle-like as that horror in the 
corner of the ward whose sightless eyes can happily no longer 
see the vileness of her own deformity. The fresh young face 
will become the Medusa's head. She is looking at her forecast 
as if it were shadowed in a wizard's mirror — and she is but 
seventeen. 

In the road beyond the garden wall can be heard the laughter 



' BARBADOS. 15 

of those who pass by to the town, while within is being dragged 
out, act by act, one of the saddest tragedies of human life. 

It was a relief to pass from the lazaretto to even such a haven 
for the helpless as the lunatic asylum. This is a new, admirably 
administered building under the competent charge of Dr. Manning. 
The best remembered feature in the asylum is an open quad- 
rangle covered with grass. Around each side of it runs a low shed 
or verandah upon which open the barred windows of many rooms. 

In this strange caravanserai are gathered a great number of 
insane folk, mostly negroes. In the centre of the quadrangle a 
grey-headed mulatto is kneeling in the sun and praying with 
breathless eagerness. He is a religious monomaniac. 

A comparatively young man, sweating with excitement, and 
puffing out his cheeks like a dog who dreams in his sleep, is calling 
out that he is Lord Nelson, and that he wants boots. Lying 
senseless in the shade is a man recovering from a fit. Drooping 
on benches are listless melancholies, while among them is a man 
who sits bolt upright and for ever pats his hand to the moaning 
of some fragment of a song. A very cheerful being, squatted on 
the ground, is professing to make a hat out of grass roots collected 
with infinite assiduity. There are, besides, idiots and dotards and 
the absolutely mindless. 

One figure amidst this nightmare crowd attracted my atten- 
tion. He was a white man of about forty, with long fair hair. He 
was clad simply in a shirt and trousers. His feet were bare. He 
never ceased to walk round and round the shaded alley, per- 
sistently, laboriously. His lips were compressed, while there was 
a look of forlorn determination in his eyes. He had been in the 
asylum seven years. He was a Scotsman, and was reputed to 
be a sailor from Aberdeen. He had been left behind sick, and 
apparently dying, by a ship whose master had never called at the 
island again. Every effort to trace the man's friends had failed. 
Since he had been in the asylum he had never uttered a word, 
nor had he once replied to the persistent questions put to him. 
For seven years he had kept silence. For seven years he had 
tramped, day after day, round this walled quadrangle, picking his 



i6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

way through the mumbling crowd. To what far-away goal he was 
travelling, along what endless road, amidst what horrors and 
under what crushing vow, who could say ? 

Here he was, a derelict ; one of the " missing," one of those who 
had gone under. In some Highland village they may still tell 
how " Jamie " went to sea and was never heard of again, or how he 
was put ashore ill on a West Indian island and died there. He 
must have died, his mother will say, or he would have written or 
come home. He has never written ; he will never come home, but 
will tramp, a lonely man, round and round this circle of purgatory 
until his foot falters and he stumbles into the daric 



IV. 

THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 

Barbados is a coral island, A coral reef encircles the greater 
part of its homely girth, its roads are made of coral of the whitest, 
while much of the stone of its houses has been fashioned by the 
coral polyp. 

Those who know only the land around Bridgetown will say 
that the country is flat and monotonous, and that it consists 
merely of blinding highways toiling through tiresome tracts of 
cane and cotton, of cotton and cane. 

It is true that the trees are limited to the wilds, to the villages, 
and to the planters' settlements, but there are downs of golden- 
green grass as well as hollows dappled with yams, sweet potatoes, 
and maize. Moreover, a hundred acres of rustling sugar-canes 
thrown into waves and eddies by the rollicking trade wind is no 
mean sight, while a field of sea-island cotton in bloom is, from 
afar, not unlike a thicket of Gloire de Dijon roses. 

Towards the north of the island are hills, some of which rise to 
the height of iioo feet. They are part of a great upland which is 
cleft, as by a hatchet, along its eastern side so as to leave a raw 
inland cliff, whose precipitous wall faces the Atlantic for many 
a mile. From any point on the brink of the escarpment a 
marvellous view extends. The most perfect prospect is from 
a spot called Hackelston's Cliff. Here, from a height of nearly 
lOOO feet, one looks down' suddenly upon an immense leafy plain 
stretching away to the sea, upon a green under-world submerged 
fathoms deep in a blue haze. 

C 



i8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The view is like a view from a balloon. On the flat are squares 
of pale green to mark the cane brakes, glistening splashes of holly- 
leaf green to show the bread-fruit trees, a waving patch of banana 
fans, dots of grey where are negro cabins, and now and then the 
curve of a white road shaded by palms. Beyond is the beach 
where the great purple combers from the ocean roll in to break 
upon the reef with a noise like the crack of a gun. 

This little world lying at one's feet is shut in towards the north 
by miniature mountains, a range of dwarfed Scottish Highlands 
made up of diminutive peaks and ridges, of cols and valleys all 
glorious with every tint that grass in shadow and in the sun can 
give. From the crest of Farley Hill it is possible to look down 
upon this tumbled country as upon a contour map, and to imagine 
Ben Nevis and Lochnagar en modele, with the tracks of tarns, the 
clefts of summit passes, and the cups of mountain lakes. 

Near by Hackelston's Cliff I came upon a grinning negro lad 
who enjoyed an office most boys would have taken much to heart. 
He might have been called the " warden of the monkeys." At the 
foot of the precipice, in one of the few shreds left of the primeval 
forest, dwell a number of apes who creep up the cliff on occasion 
and make desperate raids among the bananas and sweet potatoes. 
It was the warden's duty to watch for the marauders, to spy them 
out as they peered over the brim of the cliff, to let them advance 
almost to the fields, and then to fall upon them with shrieks and 
stones and drive them over the precipice in jabbering disorder. 
It was with sincere feeling that the warden said "he liked his 
work." 

Not far from Hackelston's Point is St. John's Church, one of 
the oldest churches of the island. It is a solid English-looking 
building, with a square tower, battlements and heavy buttresses. 
It stands on the very brink of the cliff, over-looking the same far- 
away flat and the same long lines of beach and reef. About it is 
a graveyard, facing seawards, full of ancient tombs, many of which 
belong to two centuries ago. More than one monument testifies 
to the deadly climate of times gone by, and tells of wives who 
died " in a moment " and " in the bloom of youth." 



THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 19 

One tablet bears the following unusual inscription : 

Here lyeth ye Body of 

FERDINANDO PALEOLOGUS 

Descended from ye Imperial lyne 

OF ye Last Christian 

Emperors of Greece. 

Churchwarden of this Parish, 1655-1656. 

Vestryman 20 years. Died Oct. 3RD, 1678. 

This imperial vestryman should sleep soundly, for the church- 
yard in which he rests is passing beautiful. Here fall the shadows 
of royal palms, of lofty crotons, of swaying casuarina,s, of hibiscus 
bushes aflame with crimson blossoms. By the church wall stand 
Eucharis lilies, over the rusted railings fall jessamine and 
stephanotis, while between the gravestones are ferns and grasses 
and an uninvited company of homely flowers. During the church 
service, when all is still, there can be ever heard — borne by the 
trade wind — the muffled roar of the surf. 

Far away to the north of the island, fifteen miles from the 
town, and on the flat between the inland cliff and the sea, is a dell 
full of trees. What lies hidden in this quiet oasis no stranger 
could guess. It can hardly shelter a planter's house as no sugar- 
mill chimney is in sight. There is no church spire to be seen nor 
is there, indeed, even a glimpse of a roof. 

The visitor who follows the road into the wood finds himself 
in an avenue of palms. This avenue skirts a lawn and such a 
lake as may be found in many an English park. So far there 
is little that is amazing, but, sauntering in the drive, are some 
youths in college caps and gowns. As unexpected are these 
undergraduates as would be cocoanut trees in Oxford. 

At the end of the walk is a solemn edifice of dull stone, ■ 
severely academic, and not to be distinguished from the buildings 
familiar to an English university town. The place is, indeed, 
Codrington College (a college of the University of Durham), 
which was founded as long ago as 17 10. 

Opening upon the avenue is a stone cloister, through the 
pillared arches of which can be seen the Atlantic and the waves 



20 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

breaking on the coral reef. In the shadow of the arcade is an 
EngHsh girl in white talking to a small parrot perched on her 
finger, and exciting by such speech the jealousy of a yapping 
dachshund at her feet. This lady of the porch is the principal's 
daughter. It would seem as if there had been transported to this 
far-away West Indian island a corner of a cathedral close, and 
when the organ in the chapel pours forth a hymn of the old 
country the impression is made magical. 

The college chapel is exquisite — for its walls are lined with 
mahogany and cedar wood, while its benches are of that old 
type which recall the village church of bygone days. The marble 
floor has been cracked and scarred by the hurricane of 1831, 
which tore off the chapel roof and filled its aisles with wreckage. 
The library is stored with books of a kind one would hardly 
expect to meet with on a coral island — works on theology and 
conic sections, together with the writings of Sallust and Cicero, 
of ^schylus and Euripides. A pleasant sanctuary this for the 
budding scholar who will recall in after life that he first read 
the Odes of Horace under West Indian palms, and was disturbed 
in his imaginings of ancient Rome by the vagaries of humming- 
birds. 

The college gardens are the most beautiful in the island, are 
vivid with the tints of tropical flowers, and hide, moreover, in 
their depths a swimming pool which is as the shadow of a rock 
in a weary land. 

Hard by the college is the principal's lodge, the original 
Codrington mansion, which was built in 1660 and has seen and 
survived some famous hurricanes. It is a picturesque building 
of weather-worn stone with, in front of it, a stately loggia whose 
arches and columns are overgrown with ferns, woodbine, jessamine 
and stephanotis. Within is a doorway, flanked on either side by 
classic pillars worthy of an abbey, upon whose stones the sun 
and the rain of two hundred and fifty years have wrought tints 
of warm brown, while weeds have picked out the joints of the 
masonry with many a splash of green. The slaves who built 
this place may well have wondered at the magnificence of it. 




_^^^^K. 




THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 21 

The founder of the college, Christopher Codrington, was 
" Captain-General of the Leeward Caribbee Islands." It was his 
wish that the school should be devoted to " the study and practice 
of divinity, physic, and chirurgery." In 1742 the original college 
was opened, and in 1875 was affiliated to the University of Durham. 
It has done admirable work, can boast a long list of distinguished 
alumni, and under the present able principal, Archdeacon Bindley, 
flourishes with persistent vigour.^ 

The shore scenery of Barbados shows great variety. On the 
north and east of the island the coast is wizen and rugged. 
Here are low cliffs of coral rock wrought into fantastic capes 
and hollows by the sea, or so gnawed at that a great gap in 
the bank has been in places bitten out. At Crane comes such a 
gap wherein is a gusty beach edged about with cocoanut palms 
and nearly filled with bushes of the sea-grape or with sprawling 
masses of creepers. 

Here, as elsewhere, the sea assumes strange and unexpected 
tints ; it may be violet, purple or maroon, with streaks of lettuce- 
green or forget-me-not blue, or may show a stretch of brilliant 
lustre such as shines on a beetle's back, or may shimmer into a lake 
of lapis lazuli. In calm days the water over the reef will be lilac- 
or even claret-coloured, or may take the hue of the nether side of 
a mushroom, while within the reef is that vivid green which can 
be looked down into from the stern of a steamer among the 
coiling eddies thrown up by the screw. It is indeed in these 
West Indian islands that 

The rainbow lives in the curve of the sand. 

At Bathsheba immense curiously shaped rocks fringe the beach, 
so that the whole coast in this romantic part of the island is as 
the coast of Cornwall in miniature. Along the south and west 
borders of the island winds a quiet strand, with many a creek and 
cove. Certain of the curving bays are shaded by thickets of 
trees which crowd to the very margin of the shore. Some are 

' See Article by the Venerable Archdeacon Bindley, D.D., in Macmillan's 
Magazine, December 1892. 



22 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

inviting, modest-looking trees, which call to mind the orchard 
trees in England. They bear, moreover, a small green fruit, an 
apple, which might tempt a thirsty man. Woe to him if he 
yields, if even the temptress be Eve ! For these are the manchineel, 
the poison trees ; the shade they offer is tainted ; their leaves 
will blister the skin ; their fruit will turn to worse than ashes in 
the mouth ; their innocence is feigned, for the orchard by the 
sea is an upas grove, shunned by every living thing except the 
land crab. 

Nelson, in his early days, was made very ill by drinking from 
a pool into which some branches of manchineel had been thrown. 
In the opinion of some his health '* received thereby a severe and 
lasting injury." 

On the west coast is Hole Town, the most inviting little 
settlement in the island. It was once the capital of Barbados 
(page 9). It is now a lovable town of two tiny streets, sleeping 
out its life in a bower of leaves by the shore. A shop, a post- 
office, and a worn jetty represent the public buildings in this ^st 
unambitious hamlet. The two small streets open on the sea, on 
a smooth cove of biscuit-coloured sand. Trees line the whole 
sweep of the bay from cape to cape. They hide the half-forgotten 
town although it lies so near the water that when the west wind 
blows the spray will scud along the child-like boulevard. The 
beach is such an one as the sea seems to love, for each wave as it 
comes, lingers over it, fondles it, sweeping slowly up the smooth 
slope and dropping reluctantly back again. 

An air of great leisure settles upon this lotus-eater's town. 
But few of its folk are to be seen. In the shade of the trees, at 
the edge of the shore, a solitary man is building a boat. There 
is such simplicity in his methods, and such scantiness in his 
clothing, that he might be Robinson Crusoe fashioning his canoe 
on the famous island. 

On this very beach landed " the inquisitive crew of the 
Olive Blossome just 300 years ago (page 8), and as the cove 
was then so it is now, the same inviting curve of tree-encircled 
sand, the same listless solitude. On just such a tree as stands 



.)m 



THE INLAND CLIFF AND THE SEA BEACHES. 23 

there yet the famous legend was writ, while here, within a halo 
of green, is a place well fitted for the wooden cross. Beyond the 
nodding town are low downs, so like some uplands in Kent that 
they may well have enticed the Englishmen to make a landing. 

By the side of the high road a recently erected obelisk records 
the coming ashore of the boat and the annexation of the island ; 
while on one of the postage stamps of the colony is a picture 
of the gallant Olive Blossome herself, with all her sails set and 
with the flag of England aloft on her poop. 



^4 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



V. 

GEORGE WASHINGTON AND ANOTHER AT BARBADOS. 

George Washington visited Barbados in 175 1, when he was a 
lad of nineteen. He came over from Virginia with his brother 
Lawrence, who had developed a lung trouble, for which he was 
advised to try the West Indies. The journey across the Gulf of 
Mexico and along the Caribbean Sea occupied them a little more 
than a month. The two brothers stayed at a house overlooking 
Carlisle Bay, about a mile from Bridgetown, and owned by a 
Captain Crofton, the commandant of Fort James. 

They had not been in the island more than fourteen days 
when George was laid low with the smallpox. The attack was 
not severe, but he bore the marks of the disease upon his face to 
the end of his days. 

It was at Barbados that George Washington, for the first 
time in his life, visited a theatre. It pleased him. The play he 
saw acted was the austere tragedy of " George Barnwell." This 
drama was supposed to be of a very improving nature, and 
especially suited to young men. It pointed a moral boisterously 
and with as much directness as is employed in driving a pile into 
the solid earth. George Barnwell was an idle apprentice who, 
after robbing his master, passed through the various Hogarthian 
stages of vice, and finally committed murder, for which crime he 
was hanged. His last moments were peculiarly embittered by 
the reflection that his sweetheart was to be hanged at the same 
time, he having — as an item of his wickedness — led her astray. 

During his sojourn in the island George Washington enjoyed 
the hospitality of the " Beefsteak and Tripe Club." He was 
introduced to this exclusive company by the judge of the 
High Court of Barbados. The members of the club met every 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AT BARBADOS. 25 

Saturday at one or other of their respective houses. Over 
the beefsteaks and the tripe the future statesman made the 
acquaintance of " the first people of the place." There seems 
to have been no meanness about the members of the club, and 
no stint in the matter of food or drink. George Washington, 
indeed, went away rather distressed by the spendthrift habits of 
his hosts, and by their luxuriant mode of living. A heavy 
dinner of beefsteaks, tripe and rum, held at three of the clock 
on a tropical afternoon, was a luxury for which the simple 
Virginian had little taste. 

Barbados has welcomed many other illustrious persons besides 
George Washington. Nelson was for a period stationed in Carlisle 
Bay. His stay there was very irksome, for he was at the time in 
love with the pretty widow at Nevis. He chafed because he was 
kept so far away from her presence, and exclaims wearily in his 
letters, " Upwards of a month from Nevis ! " — as if a month were 
a lifetime. He blamed the little colony for holding him from 
the arms of his Fanny, and took a sarcastic pleasure in heading 
some of his love letters " Barbarous Island." 

Not a few of the natives of Barbados have attained to various 
positions of eminence, but among those who can only claim to 
have become notable, prominence must be given to Major 
Stede Bonnet. The major was among " the first people of 
the place." He was a gentleman by birth who had had the 
advantage of a liberal education. He was rich — being, indeed, 
" the master of a plentiful fortune." Naturally, he was much 
respected in the island, where he enjoyed all the privileges of 
a prominent citizen. Although the records are silent upon the 
subject, it is conceivable that he was one of the pillars of the little 
church at Bridgetown. 

Some time in the year 17 16 Major Stede Bonnet began to act 
strangely. He incontinently purchased a sloop, fitted her with 
ten guns at his own expense, and engaged a crew of no less 
than seventy men. This was very surprising to his friends as 
the gallant officer had no knowledge of the sea, while yachting 
was not then an accepted diversion for people of quality. It 



26 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

was hardly to be supposed that a gentleman occupying the 
major's position would condescend to engage in commerce, and 
still more curious was it that, at this particular moment, England 
did not chance to be at war. 

To all inquiries as to his intent the major merely answered 
" Wait." The mystery of the sloop was not lessened when the 
shipwrights began to paint her new name under the stern. 
Everybody went down to the careenage to spell it out, letter by 
letter, as it developed. The name was the Revenge. 

By the time that the members of the Beefsteak and Tripe Club 
were talking of nothing else but the major and his vessel, the 
Revenge slipped out of Carlisle Bay, one very dark night, and 
disappeared into space. The sloop became the theme of the 
quay-side. Barbados had much to say about vanishing ships, 
while sympathetic neighbours who called upon the forlorn 
Mrs. Stede Bonnet had more questions to ask that lady than 
she was disposed to reply to. The more astute females of 
Bridgetown whispered that Mrs. Stede Bonnet had something 
on her mind. She had. 

In a few months the awful truth reached the island. Major 
Stede Bonnet, the wealthy landowner, the respected and polished 
soldier, had become a pirate. The Revenge was cruising off 
America, taking prizes right and left. She had become the 
terror of New York and Philadelphia, for the major had the 
boldness to make Gardner's Islet, off Long Island, his occasional 
headquarters. 

"This humour of going a-pyrating," writes Johnson in his 
" History of the Pyrates," " it was believed proceeded from a 
disorder of the mind, which is said to have been occasioned by 
some discomforts to be found in the married state." Things were 
beginning to be explained. The respectable matrons of Barbados 
gathered up their skirts and fell away from Mrs. Stede Bonnet 
when they met her in the streets of Bridgetown. They could 
not drink a dish of tea with a pirate's wife ! They could hardly 
be constrained to sit in church under the same roof as the associate 
of corsairs. There were many friends of bygone days who now 



MAJOR STEDE BONNET. 27 

owned that " they had never quite liked her," that they had always 
thought " there was something curious about her." Those among 
them who were of the sect of the Pharisees audibly thanked God 
that they had not driven their husbands " to go a-pyrating." There 
is no doubt but that the home of the Bonnets was broken up for 
ever. The major's grievances must have been very deep to have 
led him to give to his ship such a name as the Revenge. 

In the meantime the soldier-pirate was not happy. He fell in 
with one Edward Teach, who is allowed by all connoisseurs to have 
been the greatest scoundrel who ever flourished in the buccaneering 
profession. Mr. Teach not only took the poor major into partner- 
ship against his will, but practically absorbed him, ship, crew and 
all. He concluded the distasteful alliance by robbing him of the 
more substantial of his possessions. This, as the Stede Bonnet 
biographer asserts, " made him melancholy." 

The melancholia would appear to have marred the major's 
efficiency as a practical pirate, for he was captured off Carolina in 
171 8. He was taken ashore, but managed to escape in a canoe. 
So highly was he valued, however, that 70/. was offered for his 
arrest. He was finally seized on Swillivant's Island on the sixth 
day of November in the year named. He was tried at Charles- 
ton four days later, was sentenced to death and promptly hanged 
at a prominent place called White Point. It was Judge Trot who 
passed sentence on him, and it seems clear that this gentleman 
added great unrest to the major's last hours, for before disposing 
of the culprit he treated him to an address of such length that it 
occupies six closely crammed pages of print. In this discourse 
the learned judge improved the occasion by quoting very liberally 
from the Scriptures, and by giving fluent advice as to the leading 
of the Higher Life, of which same advice the major was to be so 
shortly prevented from availing himself In this harangue, which 
is said to have been most impressive. Judge Trot made no allusion 
to that " disorder of the mind," or to those " discomforts in the 
married state " which led the major to seek refuge in the distrac- 
tions of buccaneering, and which may have been advanced in some 
palliation of his oflence. 



28 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



VI. 

THE ISLANDERS, 

The negro population of Barbados have learnt stern lessons on 
such subjects as the survival of the fittest, the effects of a generous 
birth-rate and the limitations of an island. They have crowded 
the fatherland to its brink, have grubbed up and tilled every yard 
of its surface, and have only left it when they have been practically 
pushed into the sea. They have become, by force of circumstances 
and against their natural inclination, both a hard-working and a 
frugal folk. They have learnt that patriotism and a clinging to 
home may mean both an empty stomach and a bare back. 

Only of late years has the Barbadian accepted the inevitable, 
and reluctantly sought life elsewhere. There is now scarcely a 
quay on a West Indian island where the grinning Barbadian face 
will not be met with. They have migrated to America and have 
turned in thousands to Panama, whereby it has com,e to pass that 
labour is now not too plentiful in the colony, and the English 
housewife has begun to experience that dearth of good servants 
which has long been acute in England. 

The negro in Barbados — as in other islands of the West Indies 
— is the descendant of slaves brought over from the adjacent coast 
of Africa. The days of their bondage are not so long ago, for 
slavery was abolished in English colonies as recently as 1834. 
Traces of old days are constantly to be come upon. Certain of 
the substantial little houses built for the " blacks " are yet to 
be found, while on all sides the products of slave labour are in 
evidence. 



THE ISLANDERS. 29 

Turning over old island newspapers, one meets with such an 
announcement as this : 

"58 Negro Slaves and 24 Head of Cattle for Sale," 

in the reading of which it is impossible not to be struck with 
the delicacy which places the slaves before the cattle. In the 
"Barbadian" for December 17, 1824, I noticed the following 
paragraph, which is bracketed with one dealing with the sale 
of " A Handsome Horse " : 

"For Sale! 
**A young Negro Woman, a good house-servant, with her 
infant child, two months old." 

If the infant ever reached the age of seventy he would have 
been living in 1894, and, should he have had a child, the same 
might be flourishing on the island at this moment, possibly as 
a waiter or a chamlDermaid at the hotel. If he or she talked 
of " grandmother," it would be of this same young negro woman 
who was so good a house-servant, and who was offered for sale 
with the handsome horse. 

The subjoined item from the " Barbados Mercury " of the date 
of August 4, 1787, is also of interest : 

" Run away from the subscriber, a tall black man named 
' Willy ' : whoever will deliver him to the subscriber shall 
receive one moidore reward." 

Now I take the moidore to be equivalent to the sum of twenty- 
seven shillings, therefore, Willy, in spite of his tallness, would 
have been little more in value than a pet dog. Indeed, I have 
seen the reward of two pounds offered for a runaway cat. It is 
much to be hoped that Willy never came back to the subscriber, 
but that he hid his pound and a half's worth of flesh in the jungle 
by the Inland Cliff and there ended his days in peace. 

When slavery was abolished, Parliament voted a sum of money 
to be paid to owners as compensation for setting their slaves at 
liberty. The total sum thus expended in the salvation of men 
was nearly nineteen millions sterling. The number of slaves set 
free was no less than 770,280. 



30 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

They were probably the only human beings who ever came to 
know precisely what they were worth, or what was their value in 
the eyes of others, for in the carrying out of the Act the value of 
each type of slave had to be defined with great exactness. 

A first-class field hand was priced at £g4, a domestic servant 
at ;^82. It may be imagined that many a dignified black butler, 
who appraised himself at, at least, ;^8oo, must have been hurt by 
this low figure. The vexation of the handsome negress who found 
that she was valued at some £2 less than her ill -looking co-workei 
must have been peculiarly bitter. Children under six fetched 
^13 I'/s. 4d. on an average. "Aged, diseased, and otherwise 
non-effective adults" were lumped together, like soiled goods 
at a sale, and priced at ;^io Ss. $\d. each. In this estimate of 
the value of a marred human life there is a lamentable pathos 
about the farthing. 

Although the Barbadian blacks must have been compounded at 
the outset from different African tribes, it is remarkable that, by 
reason of their exclusiveness, they have developed into a definite 
race, with an easily recognised physiognomy and dialect. A head 
that is large and round and that is associated with an " open 
countenance " constitutes the " Barbadian head " ; while the English 
the people affect to speak is the most curious phase that tongue 
can ever have assumed. To "untrained British ears it is not 
intelligible, while even the cry of the children, who hold out their 
hands and grin "gimme a pension," needs to be explained as a 
demand for a penny. 

The Barbadian negro is a fine specimen of humanity. The 
man may not be noteworthy, but the woman is a model ot 
anatomical comeliness. She has well-moulded limbs, perfect teeth 
and the eyes of the "ox-eyed Juno." Her neck and shoulders 
belong to the women of heroic days, while the carriage of her 
head and the swing of her arms as she walks along the road are 
worthy of the gait of queens. She is as talkative as a parrot, her 
smile is that of a child at a pantomime, and without her the West 
Indian island would lose half of its picturesqueness. She is the 
life of the gaudy market square, while her black face may appear 



THE ISLANDERS. 31 

almost beautiful when seen against the pale green background of 
a thicket of cane. She works hard and is strong. Her disposi- 
tion is to carry everything, great or little, upon her head. Thus 
I have met an old woman bearing aloft on her skull a full-sized 
chest of drawers and not far behind her a young housewife with 
a slice of green melon on the black mat of her hair — an offering 
to her husband in the fields. 

The normal costume of the negress is a frock of white, 
stiffened with cassava, and a white scarf or kerchief bound turban- 
wise about her forehead. Her woolly hair is covered by the linen 
cap, and as her white teeth are always gleaming — for she needs 
must smile — she forms a graceful figure sketched boldly in black 
a:nd white. 

It is curious to see in these dark faces classic types of woman- 
hood which custom has made the European to associate only with 
a fair skin. Here, for instance, sitting on a cabin step, crooning 
over her baby, is a rapt Madonna in ebony. Leaning over a 
railing and swinging a scarlet hibiscus blossom before her lover's 
face is a coal-black Juliet, in an ecstasy of fondness. In the 
market place, in a vortex of violent speech, is a terrible virago 
with the seams of her features cut out of jet, urging her husband, 
a timid Macbeth, to avenge certain wrongs incident to the selling 
of yams. 

Unhappily, the negress of Barbados is discarding her own 
charming costume in order to assume, with great seriousness, the 
attire of Europe. The result is deplorable, for so eager is the 
blackamoor to be done with the past that she becomes, in a sense, 
almost too European. Unconsciously she intensifies every feature 
of northern dress, making each item ridiculous. She caricatures 
the lady of the London parks, so that any who wish to see their 
faults displayed through the medium of exaggeration can have the 
distorting mirror held up to them in Barbados. 

The coloured lady omits nothing. She holds her skirts in the 
manner of the moment, but, as the mincing mode is apt to be 
overdone and as clothing in the tropics is thin, the effect is often 
curious. Although accustomed to a blazing sun the whole year 



32 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

through, and although her race comes from near the " line," the 
modern negress cannot be seen on Sunday without a sunshade 
which she will hold up even if the sky be grey. She must not 
fail to wear a veil, though no exposure to the eye of day can spoil 
her complexion or add a deeper tint to the shadows of her skin. 

The chief difficulties in the way of perfect mimicry are 
anatomical, being dependent upon the waist, hair and feet. The 
European waist has been trained for centuries to follow certain 
lines of deformity, but the waist of the negress is that of the 
Venus of Milo and it resents the disfigurement very stoutly. 

The hair problem is much more grave, and is indeed almost 
insurmountable. The astrachan-like wool on the black lady's head 
can be changed by no known art into anything that could be coiled 
or braided. The fight with the woolliness of wool in Barbados is 
desperate and discouraging. A young girl's hair is worked out 
into little tags which hang about her worried skull like black curl 
papers. These are intended to represent tresses, but although 
they could not deceive an infant they are diligently toiled at by 
ambitious mothers. By a bolder display and higher flight of art 
a bow is fixed somehow to the nape of the neck, to foster the 
delusion that it ties up raven locks. Some ingenious women have 
cut or carved out of the solid wool on their heads the figures of 
braided coils, just as a pattern is clipped out of a poodle's back. 
These carvings are made realistic by the addition of many combs 
which suggest that they prevent the " coming down " of hair which 
would not be ruffled by a hurricane nor disturbed by the thickest 
bramble bush. 

There is an article of the European coiffure called a " slide," 
a species of brooch used to keep in order any wayward hairs about 
the nape of the neck. No self-respecting negress is without one 
of these controllers of stray locks, although in her case it is the 
hair that keeps the slide in place and not the slide the hair. 
Indeed there is more suggestion, more pretence, more fancy about 
the head adorning of a negress than about a Japanese garden. 

The skull of the mulatto shows varying grades between wool 
and hair, and as the difference widens so does the brown woman 



THE ISLANDERS. 33 

attain nearer to the standard of perfection. She becomes an 
object of envy, since a higher walk in life and a loftier social status 
may be reached by even three inches of reasonably straight hair. 
To the Barbadian, indeed, combs are more than coronets and 
lanky locks than Norman blood. 

The foot problem is also serious. The negro having found 
no need for boots has wisely worn none, but as bare feet are de trop 
in Park Lane so they must not tread the coral paths of Barbados. 
There is no affectation about the feet of a negress, no pretence that 
they may be mistaken for " little mice stealing in and out beneath 
her petticoat" They are practical feet of serviceable size, but by 
some means or another, groans or no groans, they must be forced 
into cheap American shoes, and the graceful elastic walk must 
degenerate into the mechanical-toy mode of progress affected by 
the higher civilisation. 

This attempt to be up to date involves such general suffering 
that it is not considered dimodi with the smart set for a lady, 
when returning from a gymkhana, to take off her shoes and open- 
work stockings and carry them in her hands. I am told that in 
courts of law the manner in which evidence is given is apt to be 
affected by boots ; so that an uneasy witness is often invited by 
the Bench to remove her foot-gear. If a bride faints at the altar, 
as is not uncommon, a sympathetic whisper runs through the 
assembly, not to " give her air " or " unloosen her dress," but to 
" take off her boots " ; and when the operation has been carried out 
in the vestry the nuptials can proceed, although the young wife 
may never recover from the degradation of having been married 
in stockings. 

If the negress must wear boots, she should wear them on the , 
top of her well-balanced head. A pair of crimson satin shoes 
with gilded heels would look never so well as on the cushion of 
her woolly hair. 

The black man has less wide fields for display than has the 
black woman. He is, however, strong in the matter of neckties, 
scarf pins and finger rings. He is strong, too, in waistcoats, which 
are at times so violent in colour as to be almost explosive. He 

D 



34 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

bases his model in dress upon a blending of Margate sands with 
the racecourse at Epsom. He cannot appear without a cigarette, 
nor without a cane which he carries like a Guardsman. 

The West Indian negroes generally are a healthy, cheerful and 
sober people. Professional beggars are unknown among them, as 
also are " slum children " and the counterpart of the Whitechapel 
woman. The white folk who live in their midst are prone to say 
that the more you know of the negro the less you like him. He 
has certain estimable child-like qualities, it is true, but he is un- 
trustworthy and idle, while his misconceptions of honesty and 
truth are inconvenient. 

If left to himself he tends to degenerate, for the spirit of the 
wild has not yet died out of him. In up-country districts in any 
of the islands the black man is respectful to strangers, but in the 
seaport towns he is apt to be insolent when the opportunity offers. 
At Roseau in Dominica, for example, the quayside nigger would 
appear to have lapsed into savagery if the experience of certain 
ladies who recently landed there can be taken as an instance. 

An account of the islanders would scarcely be complete with- 
out mention of certain other living things which serve to give 
character to the colony. Conspicuous among these are the black I 
birds — the Barbadian crows. The full and proper title of these 
fowls is Quiscalus Fortirostris. They go about in companies, being 
very sociable. They are jet black and have white eyes. Their 
neatness and trimness are immaculate. They look like a number 
of dapper little serving-men in black liveries, or may be compared 
to smart vivacious widows with indecorous high spirits. Their 
curiosity and fussiness can only be matched by their unceasing 
energy. There is nothing that goes on in the streets or by the 
roadside which fails to interest them, while every detail of their i 
lives appears to evoke an endless chattering. 

The Barbados sparrow is another very sociable and pushing 
bird. He is greenish-grey in tint, but what he lacks in brilliancy 
of plumage he makes up in impudence. He comes to the early 
breakfast in the bedroom, hops on to the table or a chair-back, 
and if he is not served at once with sugar or banana will call out i 



THE ISLANDERS. 35 

petulantly like an old man at a club who is kept waiting for his 
lunch. He is a thief by conviction, and steals for the mere 
pleasure of stealing. 

The sugar-bird is not so common as either of these two. 
Archdeacon Bindley, however, tells of his habits and of his ability 
to make himself at home. He drops on to the breakfast table as if 
he had been invited, and after he has helped himself out of the 
sugar-basin will, as likely as not, proceed to take a bath in his 
host's finger-bowl.* 

Another flying thing is the flying-fish, which is as common in 
the fish market at Bridgetown as is the herring at Yarmouth 
The visitor will eat him with curiosity at first, but when it becomes 
evident that no meal in the island is complete without flying-fish, 
under some guise or another, the novelty abates. 

Finally, Barbados would appear to be that West Indian island 
which is favoured above all others by the land crab. His burrows 
are to be seen not only along the shore but by the side of every 
road that skirts the habitations of man. He takes up his abode in 
the garden, digs his tunnels in the environs of the house, and has 
turned more than one graveyard into a miniature rabbit warren. 
He is an unclean beast, his habits are nasty, and any contemplation 
of his precise mode of living is of a kind that makes the flesh creep. 
He appears occasionally upon the dinner table as an article of diet, 
I have eaten him under these circumstances, and the memory of 
this indiscretion is the only blot in my West Indian experiences. 
I feel that I have lost all right to criticise people who eat raw fish, 
snails, snakes and lizards. 

The land crab, when he is fully grown, is about the size of the 
palm of the hand. In Barbados he is usually of a cherry-red 
colour, a tint which compels the impression that he is distended 
to bursting with unwholesome blood. He is shy — more shy than 
he was when Amyas Leigh and Salvation Yeo landed at Barbados 
on their journey westward. At that time he and his tribe " sat in 
their house-doors and brandished their fists in defiance at the 
invaders." He is agile, his legs are long and like stilts of tin. 

* The Pilot, October 5, 1901. 



36 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP, 

When he walks he moves with a parched, scratching sound that is 
horrible to hear, and that suggests the fumbling about of a witch's 
nails. 

I can imagine no more awful awakening than that which would 
befall the exhausted man who, having dropped asleep by the 
roadside or on the shore, woke to find these dry, crackling, carrion- 
eaters crawling about him as if he had been long dead. 



\ 



Mr--:* 



Vm 


""J^a 


^^B 






A planter's house, BARBADOS. 
A circle of Cabbage Palms. 







VII. 

THE PLANTERS AND THE POOR WHITES. 

It is in Barbados that will be found the most substantial relics 
of the old West Indian aristocracy, of the planter prince who, 
in the days of slavery and dear sugar, held court in the island 
with all the pomp and circumstance of a feudal lord. Here, still 
clinging to the same broad acres, are those whose ancestors were 
among the early landowners in the colony. Such are Alleyne of 
Porters, Drax of Drax Hall, Carrington of Carrington. The son 
is educated at Eton and Oxford, as were his father and grand- 
father before him, and in the fulness of time takes up his abode 
in the old house — with a less princely income, perhaps, and with 
longer absences in the old country — but still as the hereditary 
head of an estate which has been associated with the name of 
his family for generations. 

Most of these possessions date back to the time of the great 
Civil War, when squires who were loyal to the Stuart cause 
left England to seek peace, or to found a new home in place 
of the shattered hall and the wasted meads confiscated to the 
Commonwealth. 

Those were spacious times when the lord of the great house 
would go to church in a coach and four attended by an escort 
of slaves in stiff-necked liveries, and when the lady would walk 
abroad through the estate with one black lacquey to carry her 
lap-dog and another her fan, while a third bore respectfully her 
case of simples if it was her pleasure to visit an ancient Uncle 
Tom or a sick Aunt Chloe. 

A French missionary, one Pere Labat, when he visited 
Barbados at the beginning of the eighteenth century, found the 



38 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

island overflowing with wealth, the harbour full of ships, and 
the warehouses crammed with goods from all parts of the world. 
To his thinking the jewellers' and the silversmiths' shops in 
Bridgetown were as brilliant as those of the Paris boulevards. 
He noted at the same time, as a hint apparently to his ever- 
watchful nation, that the island was imperfectly fortified. 

There are traces left of the ancient days in certain fine old 
mansions which, with no little architectural pretence, show as strong 
a leaning to the type of the English country house as the tropics 
will allow. One has gone to such servility in imitation as to 
possess fireplaces in its sitting-rooms. Some even are built of 
stone from England brought over as the ballast of brigs and barques 
that sailed from Plymouth. A few contain pieces of the heavily 
carved furniture of bygone days, huge presses, sombre four-post 
bedsteads, ample wine-coolers, semi-r6^al plate, with possibly old 
family portraits of staid men whose faces are wrinkled by many 
seasons of heat or seamed by the maws of irreverent worms. 

The present-day planter's house is a solid building of piaster 
and stone hidden among trees and approached by an avenue of 
cabbage palms, of which the owner is proud. Around the house 
is an ample stone colonnade, or modern verandah, where on a 
table lies the favourite pipe. There is nowhere a stinting of 
space. The staircase is wide arid easy of ascent ; the inner walls 
are not all carried up to the ceiling, but the space is filled in 
with lattice-work to allow a free passage for the breeze. Every 
window is jealously sheltered by wooden blinds. The rooms are 
consequently dark, for the sun is an abhorred thing. Carpets 
are rare because creeping things are common. The sideboards 
are liberally wide because the West Indian planter is the most 
hospitable of men. The floors are polished like glass and as 
slippery. 

Everywhere are there reminiscences of home. Here on the 
table are ancient magazines with curled-up leaves and torn 
covers. They have been read and re-read, but no one has the 
heart to throw them away or hand them over to be pawed by 
aliens, for they are sacred things. On a wall, stained by the 



THE PLANTERS AND THE POOR WHITES. 39 

last hurricane of rain, is an insect-mottled drawing of the old 
house in England, a place with gables, a walled garden and a 
yew hedge. Below hangs a photograph of a college " eight, ' 
with the planter himself among them as he was in the days of 
his youth, but the group is so faded that the lusty under- 
graduates have become mere spectral smudges, while the only 
thing that lives is the college shield, in still defiant colours. 
Of the portraits of the father and mother very little is left but 
the dots for the sitter's eyes put in in paint by a photographer 
who was given to realistic " touching up." 

The dim room is, indeed, a room of ghosts. The cushions, 
the curtains, the coverings of the chairs are so wan and colour- 
less, while the human occupants are so unsubstantial in the 
dull light that if the full flood of the sun were to pour into the 
room one can believe that its contents would vanish, leaving only 
the black butler in his white tunic grinning at the door. 

The house and the piazza are covered with creepers ; the 
grounds about them are rich with flowers of every tint. The 
kitchen garden is a jungle compared with the prim, brick-walled 
enclosure in England. In it flourish bananas and pumpkins, 
eddoes and peppers, pigeon peas, yams, ginger, chalots and sweet 
potatoes. There will be in a corner a few English herbs, despised 
by the natives, and possibly, if the owner be luxuriant, a patch of 
cabbages. The orchard boasts of mangoes and guavas, of avocado 
pears and golden apples, of shaddocks, sour-sop, and bread-fruit, 
of sapodillas, oranges and limes. 

If there be a lady in the planter's house there is sure to be an 
English garden within sight of the windows of her room, where, 
tended with affectionate care, will be roses, nasturtiums and 
violets, or such other simple flowers as can survive the languor of 
the tropics. For this corner of the garden the negro has neither 
sympathy nor understanding, since he fails to conceive the object 
of growing anything that cannot be eaten or made into building 
stuff. I remember one such pleasance beloved above all by the 
lady of the place. The gardener was an ancient white man who, 
having been born on the island, had no opinion of the nonsense 



40 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

talked about England, nor of the puny plants that came from that 
dim Mecca. Although he had lived with the family all his days 
he persisted in classing the cherished spot and all that grew within 
it as " bush." He declined to look after it. The violets and roses 
were affected weeds unworthy of an honest man's notice. His 
faith was in yams and in fruits as big as his head. To his mistress 
the meek little plot was a garden of memories, of " things from 
home " ; to him it was mere scrub, a patch of wasted ground. It 
was not for the man of yams to know that the parent of the rose 
was still climbing over a familiar porch in Sussex, or that the 
violets had grown in a wood visited by a sorrowing couple the 
day before their ship set sail from England. 

One addition to the planter's house remains to be noticed, and 
that is the hurricane wing. In the older buildings it takes the 
form of a strong round tower of two floors communicating with 
the dwelling-house. It has the massive walls and beams of a fort, 
the narrow windows and stout doors of a dungeon and the roof of 
a gun casemate. 

Here, when the terror comes, crouch the women and children, 
while the wind hisses by like an arrow flight of invisible steel, 
slashing away the palms and trees as with a cutlass, tearing off 
the house roof and hurling it, with furniture, fencing, huts and 
plantation litter into the void. The women press their hands 
over their ears as the thunder bursts with a crash " as if the whole 
vault of heaven had been made of glass and had been shivered at 
a blow." The screaming children, who have dragged their toys 
with them, are blinded and silenced by the lightning which flashes 
through the window slits, and are then fascinated by the rain, 
which, pouring down as a weir, makes of the road a river and of 
the garden a whirlpool of mud. 

Possibly the most interesting and remarkable of the islanders 
are certain dismal folk known as the " poor whites." It may be 
surmised that the " poor whites " are colonists who have fallen upon 
evil days through the common channels of disaster, drunkenness 
and sloth. There are such, no doubt, on the island, but they are 
not the " poor whites " of Barbados. These peculiar people are 



1 




A WEST INDIAN GRAVEYARD, BARBADOS. 
The Silk Cotton Tree. 




PLANTER'S HOUSE, SHOWING (oN THE RIGHt) THE HURRICANE WING. 



THE PLANTERS AND THE POOR WHITES. 41 

descendants of some of the earlier settlers, of men who were 
colonists by compulsion, and who for centuries have enjoyed 
nothing but a heritage of woe. 

They came to the island in the holds of unsavoury ships, a 
company of condemned men and women upon whom had been 
passed the sentence of exile for life. For some the period of 
banishment had been short, for they had died in the dark under the 
festering planks of the convict-brig, and were handed up from out 
of the stench by their friends to be dropped into the wholesome 
sea. Some were prisoners who were taken by Cromwell from the 
wilds of Ireland when he suppressed the rebellion in that gallant 
country. Others were the victims of the Civil War, who had been 
dragged from their villages by plumed and belaced cavaliers to 
fight, as they were told, for the King. The larger number, it 
would seem, were yokels who had taken part in Monmouth's 
rebellion, who had shouted for him on his landing at Lyme 
Regis, or had fought for him at Sedgemoor. They had passed 
through the Bloody Assize alive, had faced Judge Jeffreys from 
the dock, had heard his curses and had shuddered under the 
malignant venom of his eyes. 

In the West Indian island the banished men had fared ill. 
Unfitted for work in the fields under a tropical sun, they had 
become dependents, loafers, doers of odd jobs and in the end mere 
squatters of the most dejected type. Pitied by the planter, held 
in contempt by the negro, without aim or object in the world, they 
had yet kept alive, with some rustic pride, the memory that they 
were white men. They married only among themselves, held 
aloof from the blackamoor and went their own way, such as 
it was. 

Their number now is few, but they are a most distinctive 
people. Long intermarriage, long living in the tropics, long 
centuries of purposeless existence have left them utterly degenerate, 
anemic in mind and body, sapless and nerveless, mere shadows of 
once sturdy men. The Briton in the West Indies clamours that 
he must go home from time to time or languish in health. These 
have never been home since the day when they were thrown out 



42 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

upon the scorching beach to fare as they liked. They have 
withered and faded and, like a painted missal which has been 
bleached of all colour by years of sun, the writing that told who 
they were has become well-nigh illegible. 

The poor whites are to be found mostly about Bathsheba, a 
joyless company of pariahs, housed in wretched huts and making 
a flabby pretence at living as fishermen. They own to names 
which are still familiar in Ireland and in the west of England. 
Some have marked Irish faces, and the doctor in whose district 
they live tells me that among not a few of the poor whites there 
still survives the pleasant brogue of Ireland. 

Those who are descended from Monmouth's men are the off- 
spring of ruddy-faced peasants who tended sheep upon the Dorset 
downs, or turned up with their ploughs the good brown earth of 
Devon. One can imagine how for years their talk would be of the 
hamlets they had left, of the cool trout streams, the shady spinnies 
and the old grey church whose bells they could hear in their 
dreams. It is certain that when each December came round they 
would babble — in spite of the never-flagging heat — of Christmas 
time, of the holly, of the snow on the uplands, of the carol singers 
and the squire's baron of beef 

The stories would come down to the sickly grandchild, to the 
still more listless great-grandson until at last the telling of such 
things as the keen English wind, the bare trees, the sheep fair and 
carrier's cart would become unintelligible and meaningless, while 
the names of Lyme, of Taunton, of Bridgewater, where the battle 
was fought, of Dorchester, where the assize was held, would be as 
the names of places that were not. 

What was once seen grows what is now described, 
Then talked of, told about, a tinge the less 
In every fresh transmission ; till it melts, 
Trickles in silent orange or wan grey 
Across the memory, dies and leaves all dark. 



VIII. 

THE DAY WHEN THE SUN STOOD STILL. 

The most terrible day in the annals of Barbados was a certain 
Sunday of May in the year 1812. The night had been intensely 
dark, no star had been visible, while those who were unable to 
sleep heard mysterious sounds as of distant thunder or of the 
firing of cannon. The many who were restless or apprehensive 
that night were consoled by the thought that at six the sun would 
rise, and that with the daylight all uneasiness would vanish. 

The clocks at last struck six but there was not a sign of dawn. 
The sky was still as black as a pall. The darkness was impene- 
trable. The white man crept out of his house and the negro out 
of his hut, full of fear and anxiously curious, yet hugging the 
thought that the clocks must be wrong, that it was really about 
midnight and that they would go back to bed again and laugh 
over the escapade in the morning. 

The village street, however, was soon full of people feeling 
their way about in the gloom, moving nervously from cabin to 
cabin. When one man stumbled against another he would clutch 
at him and ask in a whisper what all this meant. Neighbours 
called by name to those they knew should be near, but in subdued 
voices. The white man groped his way to the verandah and 
down the steps into the garden, where, with arms outstretched, he 
felt about for familiar trees, stooping forward like a blindfolded 
man. The children were early awake and crying. The women 
lit candles in their cabins, but the glimmer made the murk more 
awful. The goat and the pig, that from habit had been let loose 
at six, crept into the welcome light and hid in the shadows of the 
small room. 



44 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Seven o'clock came but there was no sign of the sun. A 
sickening panic fell upon the distracted folk in the road. They 
had become aware that two other hideous things were added to 
the mysterious darkness. The trade wind — which never failed 
— had ceased to blow. There was a blank calm, a breathless 
stillness. The sound, too, of the surf on the reef had ceased as if 
awed into silence. More than that, something dreadful was 
falling out of the air. It fell without sound, a fine soft dust, that 
was already so thick upon the ground as to make the road 
unfamiliar to the bare foot, while the patter of men's steps sounded 
as if far away. It fell invisibly upon the outstretched hand, upon 
the woolly head ; it clung to the brow ; it dried the clammy lips ; 
it clogged the staring eyes. 

A man, silly with dread, began to joke aloud and to ask why 
they had all taken to getting up at midnight? Had they come 
to see the old year out ? Before the poor gibe had died upon the 
fool's lips the meaning of the unutterable horror was realised. 
The jester had supplied the clue. To see the old year out ? Was 
not this the last moment of all the years, the end of time, the 
last day ? 

Men no longer spoke in whispers. The silence was too 
unbearable. A woman's scream rent the air, " Oh God ! Have 
mercy upon us." All restraint vanished. All now knew what the 
signs in the heavens meant. The end of all things had come. 
The sun would never rise again. This was the lull before the 
awful opening of the Day of Judgment. In a moment the sky 
would crack apart, there would be the brazen blast of the last 
trump, and God and his avenging angels would appear in the 
dome of heaven. 

There came back to many the words of the hymn, 

Lo ! He comes with clouds descending, 
Robed in dreadful majesty. 

Here were the very clouds crushing down upon them. The sky 
touched the earth. They could feel the weight of it. Had not 
the Bible said, too, " He shall come as a thief in the night " ? 



THE DAY WHEN THE SUN STOOD STILL. 45 

Men and women rushed to and fro without purpose or control. 
The highway was filled with shrieking, crazy folk. They wrung 
their hands. They clung to one another aimlessly. They threw 
themselves down upon their knees and prayed. In the quaint 
language of the negro, in bursts and sobs, in yells and screams of 
terror, supplications were hurled against the sullen heaven. The 
black man is superstitious, he is emotional and excitable. His 
religion is very rugged, and daubed on his mind in crude colours. 
He called out to God as he would to the overseer standing above 
him with a whip. He was a sinner. He was to be scourged 
and damned. The flames of Hell were in sight The appalling 
pictures of the Judgment Seat shown at the Sunday-school 
came to his mind. The devil with his horns and his pronged 
fork was waiting for him. He yelled, he clamoured, he whined 
for mercy. 

Women broke out into fragments of hymns, and sung as sick 
folk sing in their delirium. Men dropped face downwards in the 
dust of the road gasping, " I am a sinner ! I am a sinner ! Have 
pity ! Have pity ! " Others, standing erect, held up their hands 
to the black cloud, and, as the tears made streaks of mud down 
their faces, called to God to spare them. How they abased them- 
selves and grovelled ! How they promised never to do wrong 
again ! How they simpered and wept and howled ! 

The coward husband clung to the wife, believing that she 
would be saved, and that if he held on to her he might escape 
Hell when the sheep came to be parted from the goats. 

One silent man was creeping towards the beach. He had 
stolen a knife some weeks ago. He held it in his hand. It must 
be thrown into the sea. It must not be found upon him when the 
Great Judge came. 

An old woman was feeling her way to the graveyard. She 
reached the dust-clogged gate, opened it and went in. She sat 
down to wait. She knew that in a while the graves would open 
and that the earth would give up its dead. She was speechless 
with expectation, for all she held dear lay within these silent 



46 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

walls. She would see her husband again, face to face, and her 
sons and her little girl. She thought over the many things she 
had to say to them all. 

With the greater number the impulse was to hide, to run 
away, to be lost They called upon the hills to cover them. 
They rushed into the thickets of cane, and casting themselves 
headlong among the great stalks put their fingers into their ears 
to keep out the sound of the trumpet call, all the while muttering 
prayers with their lips to the earth. 

The velvety powder continued to fall. Many began to feel 
that they were being suffocated. There was no air. The dust 
stifled them. They tore the raiment from their throats and rushed 
about gasping, fighting with their hands the deepening cloud as 
drowning men battle with the waves. 

Now and then there was a crash that made every heart stop 
and for a moment silenced every scream. It was a branch of a 
tree falling that had been bent to breaking by the weight of dust 
upon it. 

Worse than that, dreadful birds flew by in the dark, and 
almost touched the shrinking crowd with their wings. Were 
these awful shapes portends and heralds of the Coming ? They 
were great sea-birds whose wings and backs were so laden with 
dust that they could scarcely flutter. They had come in from 
over the sea, moving ever more and more languidly until their 
pinions were as pinions of lead. 

The hours as they passed were struck upon the clock, but the 
tones were becoming huskier for the bells were covered deep with 
dust. 

There was still the same impenetrable night, the same dead 
atmosphere, the pitiless silence, the falling film, the slowly-moving 
wearied birds. 

At last, about the hour of one, those who looked towards the 
south saw a faint glow in the sky. It widened into a blood-red 
gap of light that stained the sea with blood and lit the clouds as 
smoke is illumined by flame. The horror, intensified by the 
rack of suspense, became inexpressible. The sky was opening I 



THE DAY WHEN THE SUN STOOD STILL. 47 

The dread Appearance was at hand ! In a moment the blast of 
the trumpet would shake the heavens and herald the Last 
Judgment Those who saw the awful sight fled or hid their faces 
in the dust. Whether they ran or whether they fell where they 
stood, they pressed their hands over their ears in expectation of the 
coming sound. 

But the silence remained unbroken. The crimson glare melted 
into kindly light. The darkness gathered itself up into a black 
cloud that hung suspended, like a clot, over the fields it almost 
touched. In a while it faded into a disc of grey and then vanished, 
leaving the island once more flooded by the sunlight of a summer 
afternoon. The trade wind blew again from out of the east, while 
upon the ear there fell once more the sound of 

The league-long roller thundering on the reef. 

The island was changed. The whole country was covered, 
to the depth of one and a half inches, by a soft grey powder, some 
of which can be seen to this day in the museum of Codrington 
College. A like dust lay thick upon leaf and bough, upon palm 
branch and cabin roof, upon the terrace of the great house and 
the deck of the brig in the haven. The sun had set over an 
island of green, it had risen on a land of ashes. 

The people looked at one another shyly at first. Some 
laughed, since all their heads were grey and their faces powdered. 
Those who had hidden among the canes crept out and swaggered 
along the road to the village as if they were returning from 
a morning stroll. Some ventured to say how amused they had 
been, forgetting that the marks of tears were fresh upon their 
cheeks. Others were thankful that they had not made fools of 
themselves, until they caught sight of the patches of mud upon 
their knees and the weeds of the ditch in their hair. 

The man who had thrown the knife into the sea repented of 
the act and resolved to dive for it at his leisure. The old woman 
hobbled back stiffly from the graveyard with the sense of a 
grievance in her mind and some mutterings of disappointment 
on her lips. The sea-birds — after eluding the cudgels of shouting 



48 



THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



boys who were still hoarse with prayer — sailed away across the 
water with cries of thankfulness. 

In the course of time a schooner cast anchor in Carlisle Bay 
bringing the news that on the day the sun stood still over 
Barbados there had been an unparalleled eruption of Mount 
Soufri^re on the island of St. Vincent, Now, Barbados is ninety- 
five miles to the windward of St. Vincent, yet thousands of tons 
of dust had been carried noiselessly all that distance and had 
been dropped upon the palpitating colony. 

The dust produced two effects — a temporary religious revival, 
and a permanent improvement in the soil of the fields, because 
it is said to have had good fertilising qualities. 



IX. 

A MYSTERIOUS SHIP. 

For many and many a year in Barbados the cry of " A sail in 
sight ■" would send a thrill through the settlement. It was a cry 
which emptied the little school-house of its boys, impelled the 
shopkeeper to clap on his wig and hasten to the beach, and led 
the planter among the canes to stop and turn his pony's head 
homewards. If it was on a Sunday when the cry came it drew 
folk out of church, one by one, and hurried the droning sermon to 
a close. 

Every ship, whether great or small, brought news, but it was 
often the smallest which carried the most weighty tidings — tidings 
of a French fleet bearing westward, of a sea iight off St. Lucia, 
of a derelict with dead men awash on her deck and the name 
Mary of Barbados under her stern. Every item of public news 
that ever reached Bridgetown had been bawled over the gunwale 
of some sea-weary craft to upturned faces in boats, while the 
anchor splashed into the bay and the cable rattled through the 
hawse-pipe. In this wise came the tidings, " The Queen is dead " ; 
" All has been lost at Worcester " ; " Nelson has blown them to 
blazes at Trafalgar." 

So long as the sails of the formless ship were as a light in the 
haze she brought with her the very message that everyone hoped 
for and waited for. She brought money to the castaway, forgive- 
ness to the prodigal, promotion to the war-tanned captain, and 
a summons home to the fretting subaltern whose heart had been 
left behind in a green rectory in Devon. 

From the Governor to the lounger on the quay there was 
a period of anxious suspense until the watchman made out the 

E 



50 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

rig and cut of the on-coming craft. To the Governor it might 
mean advancement or recall, to the lounger the landing of a 
King's officer in search of a pirate who had turned wharfinger for 
a time. 

On January 28, 1682, a ship was observed to be approaching 
Barbados from the south. She was apparently heading for 
Bridgetown, and was romping along with the trade wind on her 
starboard quarter. Curiously enough she did not seem to be in 
any hurry, for her lee sheets were handsomely eased off". Anyone 
v/ho stood on the little cliff" at St. Lawrence would have had 
a good view of her as she drew near to the reef. Her flag, in spite 
of rents and dirt, showed the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew. 
It was to be inferred, therefore, that she was British. She flew 
also another flag, a blood-red burgee decked with a bunch of 
white and green ribbons, which was a mystery to all beholders. 

The ship was so wan, so weather-stained, so old as to be almost 
spectral. She may have been a ghost ship come to look into 
Carlisle Bay for the fleet of Columbus. The paint on her sides 
was ash-coloured. The tar had cracked away in blisters leaving 
bare the planks which were as yellow as a faded leaf Her bottom, 
as she heeled over to the breeze, was green with weed and crackling 
with barnacles. Her sails, patched and ragged, hung about her 
masts like cerecloths, while many of her spars were splintered and 
" fished." She looked as if she had passed through a century of 
Bun, wind and rain. She creaked like an old basket. 

She was a galleon of some 400 tons, with the lines of a Spanish 
man-of-war, but the great house on the poop and all the carved 
work about the stern had been uncouthly hacked away, giving her 
the aspect of a ruin. She showed no guns along her sides, but 
there were ports for cannon on two decks, which ports had been 
closed and daubed over as if to conceal their existence. Across 
her stern, in letters of faded gilt, was her name. It was in Spanish 
and was a curious name — The Most Blessed Trinity. 

If any could have seen her closer they would have noticed that 
the timbers about her rudder-post were charred. Someone had 
evidently tried to set I>er on fire. Her sjdes and bulwarks showed 



A MYSTERIOUS SHIR 51 

many shot holes. She was leaking pretty freely, for a couple of 
men were cursing at the pump. The water that came out of her 
stank of rum, stale hides and sour wine. There were cutlass hacks 
along her gunwale, especially by the rigging, as if men had boarded 
her. The cabin door had evidently been burst in by a bloody 
shoulder for there was still a mark on the cracked panel. There 
was a trickle of dry and faded blood down the stair, and in the 
corner of the cabin, on the skirting-board, was a horrible glue-like 
daub with black hair sticking to it where a man, whose brains had 
been blown out, had fallen and died. 

The craft held on her course until she " opened " Carlisle Bay. 
People on shore were hurrying down to the careenage to get the 
first look at this ancient, mysterious and weather-worn ship, which 
might have hailed from Cathay. The moment, however, that the 
ghostly vessel reached the mouth of the inlet she suddenly shifted 
her helm, and, with the tiller hard-a-weather, swung to leeward 
and sailed away towards the north. In a few hours she had 
vanished. 

It would seem as if the captain of the gruesome ship had seen 
something in Carlisle Bay that had frightened him. But the 
naven was asleep in the sun. A few traders were lying along the 
quay near Bridgetown, while at anchor in the pool was a large 
frigate, H.M.S. Richmond. 

The captain of The Most Blessed Trinity was no other than 
Bartholomew Sharp,^ an acrid-looking villain whose scarred face 
had been tanned to the colour of old brandy, whose shaggy brows 
were black with gunpowder and whose long hair, half singed off 
in a recent fight, was tied up in a nun's wimple. He was dressed in 
the long, embroidered coat of a Spanish grandee, and as there was a 
bullet hole in the back of the garment it may be surmised that the 
previous owner had come to a violent end. His hose of white silk 
were as dirty as the deck ; his shoe buckles were of dull silver. 
This was the companion of Dampier, Ringrose and Wafer, the 
hero of the " Dangerous Voyage and Bold Attempts of Captain 

* Dampier's Voyages; The Buccaneers of America, by John Esquemeling. 
London, 1893 ; On the Spanish Main, by John Masefield, London, 1906. 



52 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Bartholomew Sharp." His admirers wrote of him as " that sea 
artist and valHant commander," but the captain of H.M.'s frigate 
Richmond knew him as a desperate and unconscionable pirate 
with a price on his head. 

Sharp, with 330 buccaneers, had left the West Indies in April 
1680. They landed on the mainland, and crossing the Isthmus, 
made for Panama. Having secured canoes, they attacked the 
Spanish fleet lying at Perico, an island off Panama city, and 
after one of the most desperate fights ever recorded in the annals 
of the sea they took all the ships, including The Most Blessed 
Trinity. Then followed a long record of successful pirating, of 
battle, murder and sudden death, of mutinies and quarrels. 

In the end some of the desperadoes returned " home " across 
the Isthmus ; but Sharp, in the Trinity, determined to keep to 
the ship, to sail the whole length of South America, to weather 
the Horn and to reach the West Indies by way of the sea. This 
was the " dangerous voyage " which had occupied eighteen months 
of unparalleled adventure, peril and hardship. 

Barbados was the first point of " home " they had reached, so 
that any who saw the gaunt ship on that day in January saw the 
end of a cruise the like of which had never been. But for the 
glimpse of H.M.S. Richmond in Carlisle Bay, Sharp and his 
comrades would have been' filling the taverns of Bridgetown 
with boisterous oaths, strange tales, and the fumes of rum. A 
warrant was out against Bartholomew, so he had .to be circum- 
spect. 

The log of the " dangerous voyage " affords reading as lurid as 
the " Newgate Calendar." It records how they landed and took 
towns, how they filled the little market square with corpses, how 
they pillaged the church, ransacked every house, and then com- 
mitted the trembling place to the flames. It tells how they 
tortured frenzied men until, in their agony, they told of hiding 
places where gold was buried ; how they spent an unholy Christ- 
mas at Juan Fernandez ; how, in a little island cove, they fished 
with a greasy lead for golden pieces which Drake is believed to 
have thrown overboard for want of carrying room. It gives 



A MYSTERIOUS SHIP. 53 

account of a cargo of sugar and wine, of tallow and hides, of bars 
of silver and pieces of eight, of altar chalices and ladies' trinkets, 
of scented laces, and of rings torn from the clenched and still 
warm fingers of the dead. 

The "valliant commander" had lost many of his company on 
the dangerous voyage. Some had died in battle ; others had 
mumbled out their lives in the delirium of fever, sunstroke or 
drink ; certain poor souls, with racked joints and bleeding backs, 
were crouching in Spanish prisons ; while one had been left behind 
on a desert island in the Southern Pacific. 

When The Most Blessed Trinity started on her journey south 
she had on board two English surgeons. These gentlemen were, 
no doubt, kept well employed. They went ashore with the boats 
at Arica when the pirates made the attempt to seize and sack 
that town. As civilians they would take no part in the actual 
gun and cutlass business. The fighting on this occasion being 
much protracted the two surgeons took advantage of their enforced 
leisure to become intoxicated. When the pirates were compelled 
to retreat — for they were utterly routed — the two representatives 
of the healing art were bawling out the latest London songs on 
the floor of a deserted tavern. They were rudely sobered when 
they found their hands tied behind their backs and a Spanish fist 
screwing at their collars. Of all the prisoners taken these two 
learned men alone escaped being murdered ; for it was believed 
that they might, when sober, be a comfort to the sick of Arica. 

Captain Sharp, although the leader of so many " bold attempts," 
had not himself been free from certain domestic troubles during 
the voyage. They were mostly due to religion, or rather to the 
fervour of a religious revival among the ship's company. The crew 
became at one time so repelled by Sharp's lax morals, indifferent 
piety and utter disregard for the Sabbath that they could stand 
it no longer ; so they seized him, put him in irons and dropped 
him down on to the ballast. 

In his stead they elected one John Watling, an old and blood- 
thirsty buccaneer. He at once began Sunday services on board 
the Trinity^ to the great comfort of the men. Bartholomew Sharp, 



54 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

as he sat in the dark, on the damp stones with which the bilge was 
ballasted, could hear the music of familiar hymns rendered by 
hearty throats, a little husky, perhaps, from too much liquor. 
He could hear, too, and this would pain him most in his 
solitude, the fog-horn voice of the pious Watling " leading in 
prayer," or expounding select passages from the Holy Scriptures. 
Unfortunately, John Watling the revivalist was killed a few days 
later by a bullet through his liver, so his career as a Scripture 
reader was short. 

During Watling's captaincy, Sharp, as soon as he had been 
lifted up from the ballast, did his best to appear before the 
company as a just man made perfect. Among some prisoners 
taken about this time was an aged Indian. He was questioned 
as to Arica, the town Watling was proposing to attack. His 
answers were judged to be false, whereupon the godly Watling, 
without further parleying, ordered him to be shot to death, " which 
was accordingly done." 

This sentence was too much for ex-captain Sharp, who seems 
to have found grace while sitting on the stones in the bilge. He 
protested against the cold-blooded murder of the poor, untutored 
savage. Was he not a man and a brother ? The voice of the 
tender-hearted Bartholomew faltered as he talked of the old man's 
little home, of his aged wife, of his devoted sons. The pleadings 
of this high-principled gentleman fell unfortunately upon deaf ears. 
Finding his counsel of no avail. Sharp drew himself, up to his full 
height on the sunlit deck, and in a voice trembling with dignity 
and emotion, called for a basin of water. It was an unusual 
request, and as basins are apt to get broken on pirate ships the 
water was probably brought him in a battered salver stolen from 
a Spanish altar. Sharp at once proceeded to perform a rarely 
witnessed act. As a blear-eyed ruffian of a steward held the basin 
before him, he deliberately washed his hands in the not over clean 
water. Then, as he wiped his fingers on the lappels of his coat, 
he said solemnly, and with his eyes turned heavenwards, 
" Gentlemen, I am clear of the blood of this old man." It was 
a great and impressive ceremony — Bartholomew Sharp in the 



A MYSTERIOUS SHIP. 55 

character of Pontius Pilate — but it did not save the life of the 
wretched Indian. 

It only remains to be said that The Most Blessed Trinity^ 
after the alarm at Barbados, sailed wearily away to Antigua. Here 
some fourteen of the pirates landed, including Esquemeling, the 
historian of the " dangerous voyage." They secured a passage to 
England in the Lisbon Merchant^ and reached the peaceful town 
of Dartmouth in March 1682. 

Sharp, however, did not feel quite easy at Antigua. He was 
getting a little anxious about himself, and if he read Shakespeare 
must have often repeated the reflections of the boy in " Henry V." 
who said to Pistol, 

" Would I were in an alehouse in London ; I would give all 
my fame for a pot of ale and safety." 

Sharp, therefore, moved on to the remoter colony of Nevis. 
In the little shy harbour of that island the poor, battered, 
friendless ship came to an anchor at last. Bartholomew was sick 
of the sight of her, so he handed her over to the piteous remnant 
of his crew, who had gambled all their loot and savings away and 
had not a penny to offer for their passage home. 

As the " sea artist," in his gayest clothes, sailed out of Nevis 
on a homeward-bound merchantman he would have passed the 
Trinity lying at her anchor, dead-beat. He would have noticed 
her shot-riddled hull, her ragged sails, her rotting and too familiar 
decks. The warm breeze would have brought him a whiff from 
her open hold — a whiff of stale rum and staler bilge water. The 
odour would have reminded him of the days when he lay in irons 
below decks, listening to hymns. It may be that he waved his 
lace-ruffled hand to the poor, shirtless, unshaven gamblers who 
hung over her gunwale and who watched, through the tears in 
their eyes, the last of their comrades starting on their way to 
England and home. 



56 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



X. 

TRINIDAD. 

After a fortnight at Barbados the visitor would do well to follow 
the mail route again to the next port of call, Trinidad. The 
journey, which occupies some ten hours, is generally made at night, 
so that by the time the sun is well up the steamer is in the Gulf 
of Paria. 

Trinidad is the most southerly of the West Indies, the island 
nearest of all to the Equator. It lies close to the mainland, being 
indeed but a detached fragment of Venezuela. The Gulf of Paria 
is the little sea shut in between the continent of South America 
and the wayward island, which same dissevered land seems to be 
stretching out its arms towards the mother country. Within 
those arms is the famous gulf. 

Trinidad is not only a very beautiful island, but it is typical of 
the tropics and of the West Indies generally. It is a place, 
therefore, for a prolonged sojourn, especially as its roads are 
excellent, and the means of communication both by train and coast 
steamer are ample and convenient. There is just one drawback 
to the island, which even the generous hospitality and ready 
kindness of the inhabitants cannot make quite imperceptible, and 
that is the climate. It is hot, damp, and enervating, while the 
insects of the colony are rather overwhelming in their attentions 
to newcomers. 

Seen across the gulf, Trinidad is an island of a thousand hills, 
of incessant peaks and ridges, and of a maze of winding valleys. 
From the sea margin to the sky line it is one blaze of green, the 
green not of grass but of trees. Trees cover it from the deepest 
gorge to the broken-glass edge of the highest peak. It is the 



TRINIDAD. 57 

island of Lincoln green. Viewed from a long way off it would 
seem to be covered uniformly with green astrachan. Seen nearer 
one wonders if there can be a level road in the place, or indeed 
any road at all, and if the inhabitants can ever find their way out 
of the woods, so as to get a glimpse of the sky. 

Here, at last, is the green of a West Indian island, a hoard, 
a pyramid, a piled-up cairn of green, rising aloft from an iris-blue 
sea. Here is a very revel of green, clamorous and unrestrained, 
a " bravery " of green as the ancients would call it, a green that 
deepens into blue and purple, or that brightens into tints of old 
gold and primrose yellow. Here are the dull green of wet moss, 
the clear green of the parrot's wing, the green tints of old copper, 
of malachite, of the wild apple, the bronze-green of the beetle's 
back, the dead green of the autumn Nile. 

From the Gulf of Paria can be seen the coast of the Spanish 
Main, and those pale mountains beyond whose heights lay El 
Dorado and the city of gold. The water of the gulf is dull. It is 
sullied by the great Orinoco river, for the mud that clouds it is 
washed from off the slopes of the Andes. 

On a wide open flat, at the foot of the thousand hills, where 
the land has come out to breathe, is a cluster of buildings. This is 
Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad. The town is not noteworthy. 
It has been many times burnt down, in which various fires the 
old Spanish houses and the rambling lanes have vanished, while 
out of the ashes has arisen a more and more precise city, laid out 
in mathematical lines, like a chess-board, with every street straight 
No two houses are, however, alike. Some are of brick, a few of 
stone, some are of concrete and iron, while a multitude are mere 
shanties of wood. 

The main thoroughfares are made up largely of wooden shops 
of two stories, scorched and warped out of shape by the sun, tinted 
with more or less decolorised paint and richly endowed with 
corrugated iron. The space of the street is encroached upon by 
arcades, by latticed balconies, by sloping sun-shutters, shop signs, 
palms and telegraph poles. Many of the buildings in the business 
quarter look as if they were only temporary structures and had no 



S8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

claim to belong to an abiding city. The streets are glaring and 
steamy as well as a-rattle with electric trams, the overheard wires 
of which hiss, as if red hot, when the cars rumble by. There are 
trench-like gullies on either side of the road ready to be turned 
into torrents by the tropical rains. 

No dogs in the world are so indefinite in the matter of breed 
as are the street dogs of Trinidad. They have lost all the 
characteristics of species, belong to no determined class and are 
simply " dogs." 

Among the many curious objects in the streets of the place are 
certain loathsome birds called " Johnny Crows." They are greasy 
looking vultures with bare indiarubber necks, the cringing walk 
of Uriah Heep, Jewish beaks and a general air of nastiness. They 
dabble about the gutters in search of offal. When they are gorged 
they flap away to a housetop where they brood filthily. If a 
septic germ could be metamorphosed into a thing with wings it 
would take the form of a " Johnny Crow." Although these mean 
fowls are so disgusting to look at when they are limping about a 
midden-heap they are almost angel-like when they are seen high 
up in the blue heavens, wheeling in great circles round and round 
the city, as if with watchful tenderness. 

The town folk of Trinidad appear to live mainly in the streets 
and to spend their days leaning out of windows or over balconies, 
for the climate is unfavourable to movement. So many nationalities 
are represented in the highways and byways of Port of Spain that 
it might have been on this island that the Tower of Babel was 
erected. There are negroes, mulattoes and "coloured" people 
of every known shade, French, Spaniards and English folk. East 
Indians in great multitude, Tamils, Americans, Venezuelans, 
Germans, a Chinaman or two, and a few anomalous beings who 
are of as uncertain species as the dogs and who would be classified 
simply as "men." 

Although Trinidad has been British since the year 1797 it has 
by no means lost the evidences of its earlier occupation. Some of the 
chief families and landowners on the island are Spanish or French. 
To the same nationalities belong many of the most prominent 



TRINIDAD. 59 

citizens. Spanish names abound over shop-doors and over many 
a gaudy tavern, while on the map of Trinidad it is the Spanish 
name that everywhere predominates. After the Spaniards the 
French made a struggle for a place on the map. They came with 
their Bale Blanckisseuse, Pointe Sans Souci and Ildt Saut d'Eau. 
Finally some worthy Irishman managed to make his mark at one 
spot on the atlas with Erin Point and Erin Hill ; but with these 
exceptions British names are very few. The black nursemaids, 
who chatter for ever on the seats in the park, talk in French, while 
in the streets Spanish will be heard nearly as often as English. 

The residential parts of Port of Spain and the suburbs 
generally are most delightful On the outskirts of the town is a 
wide stretch of green, the Savannah, the delight and pride of 
Trinidad. This " level mead " is surrounded on one side by a 
semi-circle of many-peaked hills which are covered with trees to 
their summits. It is as if behind the open plain of Hyde Park 
there rose, as a background, the foot hills of the Himalayas. 
Casual paths wander across this great stretch of green, just as in 
any urban pleasure-ground, but there are features in the Savannah 
which would look curious in a London park. Among such are 
a clump of palms standing alone, the palings and grand-stand of 
a race-course, and, above all, a curious little old-world cemetery 
within a high wall. The enclosure for the dead is hushed by the 
shade of many trees, so that when the Savannah is made riotous 
by horse-racing or polo matches the cattle creep under the old 
walls and so find peace. 

In a circle round the Savannah are brilliant villas standing in 
still more brilliant gardens where are the blood-coloured poin- 
settia, the blue convolvulus, the fan palm, lavish creepers of every 
tint, strange cacti like candelabra, and a very thicket of flowering 
trees. 

It is in these pleasant places at sundown that the fire-flies are 
to be seen — curious little specks of light wandering in the 
shadows. There is a languor about their movement, a listless 
uncertainty in their flight, as if they were tired gnomes with 
lanterns searching for something that was never to be found. As 



6o THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

the amber yellow spark moves up through the purple it vanishes 
disappointed. It comes towards you through the grass, and when 
so near that you dare not breathe it dies away. The light-carrier 
seems to weary so soon, while the light, as if weakened by 
centuries of searching, seems hard to keep aglow. 

The East Indians of Port of Spain congregate in an untidy 
suburb called Coolie-town. Here, surrounded by palms, bare 
earth, kerosine tins, goats, children and fowls, are lines of huts, 
some of mud and wattle, some of wood, some of corrugated iron. 
They are all of the packing-case or fowl-house type of construc- 
tion. There are among them sickly-looking shops as well as 
companies of women bright with bracelets and rings who squat on 
the ground before baskets full of yams, bananas, oranges and salt 
fish. The place is as little like an Indian bazaar as China-town 
in San Francisco is like the alleys of Canton, but it is as full of 
strong colours and strong smells. 

Everywhere about the suburbs will be seen the solemn tick 
bird, a black bird with a heavy hooked beak, a long tail and — as 
its name implies — useful habits. Everywhere, too, can be heard an 
irrepressible yellow-brown bird who spends its life in calling out, 
" Qu'est-ce qu'il dit ? " Never in this world has a question been 
asked so often. The inquirer always lays great emphasis on the 
word " dit," sometimes adopting "a querulous tone and sometimes 
a suggestion of remonstrance. The purity of the French varies 
with the individual fowl, but it seems to be generally spoken with 
an American accent. If a person were lying seriously ill in 
Trinidad I should imagine that the first care would be not to put 
straw down before the open window but to drive the " Qu'est-ce 
qu'il dit ? " birds out of hearing. 

The flying things, however, for which the island is most 
famous are the humming-birds. They were to be seen, at the 
time of my stay, in great numbers in the beautiful garden by 
Government House. They elected to come there between 7 and 
7.30 in the morning. It was about this hour that the sun fell 
upon a certain bed of scarlet flowers to which they seemed to be 
devoted. They came from all sides, tiny winged wonders of blue. 



TRINIDAD. 6j 

green and gold, that for a moment one took to be great bees. 
They were so capricious, so alert, so quick as to be hard to follow. 
They sucked the honey from each flower while on the wing. 
They hung before the scarlet calyx in an ecstasy of worship, each 
little suppliant a whirl of green and gold. The vibrating wings 
could not be seen. There was merely a poised palpitating body 
with a dizzy halo on either side of it. Nothing could exceed 
the intenseness, the fervour, the exaltation of these little flower 
worshippers. It was not until they rested, with shut wings, on 
a spray near by that they turned to birds again. Thus, so long 
as the good sun shone each seemed to live 

A loving little life of sweet small works. 



6H THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XI. 

HOLY ISLAND AND THE FORT IN THE WOOD. 

It was on July 31, 1498, that the island of Lincoln green was 
discovered. The adventurer was Columbus who, with three ships, 
was making for the south on his third and most fateful voyage. 
He came, as heretofore, eager in the search for treasure. He 
followed that same will-o'-the-wisp whose light was ever to him a 
gleam of gold, and who led him all his days. 

There was in his mind the belief that as he neared the Equator 
he would drift into a belt of great heat, where would be a burnt-up 
land, natives the colour of jet, and gold and precious stones in 
much abundance. He had pictured it all — the arid shore, the 
crackling scrub, the amazed black folk, the sparkle of gold in the 
scorching rocks, the glow of rubies among the pebbles. There 
had been some foretaste already of this fiery land, for on the 
way he had glided into a windless calm where the sea was as 
polished metal, with only a shark's fin here and there to tell that 
it was not solid, where the bewildered ships hung motionless with 
their prows turned different ways, where his men fell faint with 
the heat and blind with the whiteness of the light, and where the 
seams of the vessels gaped as the timbers shrunk in the sun. The 
water in the casks was nearly spent, while from the stifling hatch 
came up, like an evil steam, the reek of rotting meat. 

The voyage had been the subject of many prayers, of many 
portents, of many vows, for to the treasure-seeker groping in the 
dark there was no hand to guide but that from heaven. The 
venture had been undertaken in the name of the Most Blessed 
Trinity, to whom was to be modestly ascribed whatever glory 
might befall its endeavour. 



HOLY ISLAND AND THE FORT IN THE WOOD. 63 

It seems to have been about the hour of noon when a servant, 
climbing to the mast-head for the fiftieth time, saw land to the 
west and yelled - the news down to the deck. In a while the 
gazers from the poop saw rise out of the sea three mountain peaks 
united at their bases into one. 

Here, in this vision of the three in one, was a wondrous miracle, 
an answer to months of prayer, an evidence that all the way the 
Holy Three had stood by the side of the unconscious helmsman. 
Thus it came about that the island was named La Trinidad. 

At once all hands were called on deck for prayers and for the 
singing together of the hymn " Salve Regina." To many of the 
bareheaded crew this kind of chant was unfamiliar, for they were 
the sweepings of the jails of Castile.. Still, with some heartiness 
the harsh song rose — together with the smell of putrid meat — 
into the blue of a tropical afternoon. 

The three peaks were the " Three Sisters " which stand by the 
sea in the south-east corner of the island. As the shore was 
approached another wonder appeared. In the place of the arid 
uplands of the admiral's surmise was a wealth of soft, delicious 
verdure beyond all imagining. 

Columbus cruised along the south coast of the promised land 
until he came to Cape Icacos, where he turned north through the 
" Serpent's Mouth " into the Gulf of Paria. While the ships were 
anchored in the entry of the channel by Cape Icacos, a great tidal 
wave bore down upon them with much foaming and roaring. 
Two of the ships dragged their anchors from the bottom, but the 
cable of the third ship parted so that the anchor was lost. In 
1877, three centuries and more after this episode, an ancient 
anchor was dredged up off this very cape. It stands now in the 
garden of the Victoria Institute in Port of Spain, and there are 
those who have the boldness to state that it is the identical anchor 
lost that day in 1498, for it bears, without any apparent embarrass- 
ment, the title " Columbus' Anchor." 

It was not until a day or so after making the land that any 
natives were encountered. They were found to be of even fairer 
complexion than those met with on previous voyages. Columbus 



64 , THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

had apparently formed an idea of fascinating the savage by means 
of music, after the manner of the snake-charmer. He had on 
board for this purpose a band of musicians. They came from the 
Spanish seaport, and, as exponents of their art, might be repre- 
sented at the present day by strolling fiddlers from the Yarmouth 
sands. The first natives who appeared were in a canoe, and 
seemed disposed to be very offensive. At once the artists were 
called on deck to put forth their charm. They commenced to play. 
The piece would, no doubt, have been the latest music-hall song 
of the time. The natives listened ; seemed puzzled ; stared at one 
another, and then with one accord discharged a full flight of 
arrows at the would-be sirens. The experiment had failed. 

Many wonderful things happened on this voyage, but the 
most wonderful of all was this. On entering the Gulf of Paria 
some low insignificant land was seen on the south-west. Columbus, 
no doubt, scanned it steadfastly enough. He was gazing for the 
first time in his travels upon the coast of the great continent of 
America, but he knew it not.^ He believed that the land he sav« 
was an island — an insignificant island. He called it Isla Sancta. 
Thus it came about that the earliest name of America was Holy 
Island. A little later he caught sight, of peaks on the mainland at 
Paria. He considered that they belonged to another island, 
whereupon, being in a soft religious mood, he named it the 
Island of Grace. 

The three ships cruised round the gulf skirting the mainland. 
A party went on shore to formally take possession of the Island 
of Grace, otherwise America, in the names of Ferdinand and 
Isabella. Columbus never landed. Although only forty-seven 
years of age he was already an old man, and was at the moment 
much reduced by gout and a painful disorder of the eyes. So he 
stayed within his cabin and while he lay in his berth watching the 
ripples of the sunlit sea reflected on the deck above him he fell 
a-thinking. He was an imaginative man whose mind was alive 
with fancies, so he soon peopled the mean cabin with dazzling 
dreams. He had no thought of mere continents, no thought even 

* America was first sighted by John Cabot in 1497. 



HOLY ISLAND AND THE FORT IN THE WOOD. 65 

of a continent greater than any yet known to the civilised world. 
His dream was more wonderful than all that. From certain signs 
and from subtle calculations he was convinced that in this very 
Gulf of Paria he had discovered the Garden of Eden. While he 
lay a-thinking, with his aching eyes closed, a smile would come 
over his face as he composed the phrases of that despatch which 
would announce to the pious queen that he had found the Earthly 
Paradise. His only idea now was to press on to Espanola so that 
he might send the great news post-haste to Spain. 

One effect of the despatch, when it did arrive, was to cause an 
old comrade of Columbus, one Alooso de Ojeda, to start at once for 
Paria. He sailed thither, not with any hallowed wish to see the 
Tree of Life, but simply with the determination to make money, 
for the admiral had said that pearls were to be found on this 
shore as well as mementos of our first parents. With Ojeda 
went the Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, whom Filson Young speaks 
of as the " meat contractor." ^ They came upon a placid bay 
where the natives had built their huts on piles in the water. The 
little village reminded the Italian of Venice, so the place was called 
Venezuela, or Little Venice, which name it holds to this day. 

Another curious outcome of this voyage was the circumstance 
that the vast continent itself come to be called America after this 
same Amerigo, the " meat contractor," 

It was not until near about the year 1532 that the Spaniards 
undertook the colonisation of Trinidad. They succeeded so in- 
differently that the welfare of the island came in time to depend 
mainly upon certain energetic French settlers who landed at La 
Trinidad two centuries later. 

In due course the inevitable British made their unwelcome 
appearance. It was in 1797. They arrived one day in February 
to the number of 8000 strong. Their ships blustered through the 
Bocas, jostling one another as they swarmed down the gap on the 
whirlpool of a tide. The Spanish governor was Don Josef Maria 
Chacon, a gallant man enough, but his garrison was so reduced by 
yellow fever, disaffection and long inactivity that he was unable to 
* Christopher Columbus, by Filson Young, vol. ii. page 91 ; London, 1906. 

F 



66 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

oppose the eager host. So he set fire to his ships, sat himself 
down on the quayside and wept over his lost island. The English, 
under Abercromby, landed near Port of Spain and pushing towards 
the place took it with the loss of but one single man. A few shots 
were exchanged some two miles outside the town, but with this 
exception there was no resistance. 

On Laventille Hill there is even now to be seen an interesting 
relic of this day when the British captured Trinidad. The green 
hill commands the town. It is steep of ascent, yet houses and 
gardens climb up nearly to the top of it, clinging on to any helpful 
ledge by the side of the unkempt road. On the apex of the 
height is a pale church, looking seawards, and near it a school- 
house where the droning sing-song of negro children seems to 
offer a sleepy answer to the brisk ever-repeated question of the 
" Qu'est-ce qu'il dit ? " bird. 

On this hilltop and entirely hidden by jungle is an old Spanish 
fort, the taking of which gave Trinidad to Britain. It capped the 
last height to be cleared, it marks the spot where the last surly 
man threw down his arms, it was the last fort to surrender. It 
represents the final hold that the failing fingers of Spain ever had 
upon the island of the Trinity. Here, in this little stone redoubt, 
came to an end a tenancy which had lasted just upon three 
hundred years. 

The fort is hard to find, for the jungle has crept too zealously 
around it. It lies in the eternal shadow of green trees, while so 
overgrown is it with brambles that it might be a barbican of the 
Palace of the Sleeping Beauty. Like a secret rendezvous in a 
wood it is approached by a path known to few. This last strong- 
hold of Spain, this redoubt of the dead, is a sturdy little place of 
grey stone, well and solemnly built. Its walls are of astounding 
thickness ; its paved court, that once echoed with the clang of 
arms, is now a wild garden, a mere tangle of green, a court 
whose silence is broken only by the patter of rain and the song 
of birds. 

It is interesting to think that this leaf-embowered fort was 
known to Picton, and must have been often and often visited by 



HOLY ISLAND AND THE FORT IN THE WOOD. 67 

him. Picton landed with Abercromby when he took Trinidad. 
He was left behind as governor with looo men. This was the 
heroic Picton who was Wellington's right hand in the Penin- 
sular war, who conducted the siege of Badajoz, who was wounded 
at Quatre Bras (but told no one of his hurt), and who, two days 
later, was killed at Waterloo by a Dullet through the brain, while 
charging at the head of his men. His portrait, in the National 
Portrait Gallery, is that of a grey -haired man, strong and alert, 
clean-shaven, with determined lips and most wondrous piercing 
eyes. If any were to seek a face which might be taken as a type 
of the British soldier it can be found in this portrait of Picton. 

Picton left his mark in Trinidad. Even the road that leads 
down from the bramble-covered fort is called Picton's Road. 
He was a great and virile administrator who, like many others 
of his metal, was worried out of office by petty interference 
from home. Indeed, in 1803, he was arrested on a charge of 
cruelty perpetrated during his governorship. He was accused of 
torturing a miserable creature named Luise Calderon, in order 
to extort from her a confession respecting the robbing of her 
master. The trial of this woman had been conducted according 
to Spanish law, and the alcaide had begged the governor to allow 
him to have recourse to the " picket." Picton gave his permission. 
The " picket " consisted in making the prisoner stand on one leg 
on a flat-headed stake or picket driven into the ground for any 
time not exceeding one hour. Under this ordeal Luise confessed. 

Picton was tried in England in 1 806 and found guilty. A new 
trial was claimed, at the conclusion of which Picton was found to 
have acted without malice, but no judgment was delivered. In 
this bald way the incident ended. The people of Trinidad sub- 
scribed 4000/. towards the popular governor's law expenses, but 
a fire having broken out in Port of Spain a short while after, 
Picton sent all the money back to help those who had suffered 
in the disaster. Such is the man with whom the little stone fort 
on the top of Laventille Hill must be for ever associated. 



68 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XII. 

ST. JOSEPH, 

Some seven miles from Port of Spain is the village of St. Joseph — 
as picturesque a little townlet as is to be found in the West Indies. 
It stands at the foot of the northern heights, just where they step 
out into the plain, so that it has behind it, ridge above ridge, the 
guardian hills, while in front is a rueful flat, the Caroni swamp, 
stretching away to the sea. 

St. Joseph stands on a small green hill of its own, placed at 
the mouth of a gorge from out of whose shadows bursts the 
St. Joseph river. 

The two streets which compose the village climb up the mound 
from two points, meet at the top, linger about a village green, a 
slumbering convent and a church, and then tumble untidily down 
on the other side. The town itself is nearly buried among trees 
and lost among gardens. 

Here is a white- walled, brown-shuttered villa in a jungle of 
green, with nothing but a fragile paling to keep the bushes from 
straying into the road. Here is a cottage covered up to its red 
roof by a yellow creeper, then come a grove of bananas, a lean 
ascetic cactus, a merry clump of whispering acacias, more white 
villas, a few thatched huts, a solitary palm. There are shops in 
one street, but if the sun be upon them the shopkeeper and his dog 
will be both asleep, and if they be in the shade, well, then a counter 
is a comfortable thing to loll across and talk. 

Life is not taken seriously in St. Joseph ; there is ever present 
the conceit that its merchants are merely playing at shopkeeping, 
so that one would not be surprised to see Peter Pan and Wendy 
counting out oranges in one of the bright-coloured " stores." 




A JUNGLE STREAM, TRINIDAD. 



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ST. JOSEPH, TRINIDAD. 



ST. JOSEPH. 69 

It is always summer at St. Joseph, at this Httle " love-in-a- 
cottage " town. The villas, one might suppose, are occupied by 
happy couples who came here on their honeymoon and have 
never had the heart to go back to the world again. 

Kingsley thought that if only there was a telegraph cable to 
the island " then would San Josef be about the most delectable spot 
he had ever seen for a cultivated and civilised man to live and 
work and think and die in." 

The town may be small, yet the sense it gives of unbounded 
leisure is very vast ; it may be lowly, yet the depths of its peaceful- 
ness are magnificent. It lies curled up on the top of its little 
hill like a purring cat in the sun. It may look up and stretch itself 
now and then on a gala day, but it will soon cuddle back into 
quietude again. This sleepy-head village, this happy-go-lucky 
town, this most lovable little garden city is no mere bucolic 
hamlet. It is called St. Joseph, but its right name and title is no 
less than San Jos^ de Oruna, the one-time capital of Trinidad. 

It was founded by the Spaniards as long ago as the end of the 
sixteenth century. From this tiny hill the entire island was 
governed. From hence thundered forth commands at which the 
whole settlement trembled. 

From hence came all the news of the world beyond the seas. 
It was a place that held its head very high, for upon the summit 
of the castle flew the proud banner of Spain. In the streets of the 
town, too, there once walked, clad in full armour and deep in 
thought, the romantic figure of Sir Walter Raleigh. 

All the restless glory has long since passed away. San Jos6 
de Oruna, the Versailles of Trinidad, has done with pomp and the 
burdens of authority. The twitter of birds and the rustle of leaves 
have replaced the trumpet blast, the tramp of armed men, the 
shuffle of obsequious feet. San Jose takes its old age very 
prettily and its retirement with idyllic grace. It is content to be 
the village of the love story, the place of the hushed garden, the 
city that was. It has no concern with the whirl of progress. Port 
of Spain is now the capital. There will be found plate-glass 
windows, electric tramways, rattling cars, yelling newsvendors, 



70 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

telephones and tourists. San Jose is satisfied to doze in the 
warmth. Its past is unsighed for and its future unconsidered. It 
takes its motto from Sancho Panza : 

There is still sun on the wall. 

The village green of St. Joseph is a small open space on the 
slope of the hill, where it is shaded by a cluster of glorious trees. 
It would be called a savannah if it were not so petty and so very 
child-like. In the centre of this diminutive common are three 
stone graves, surrounded by iron railings. One is uninscribed, but 
the other two bear the names of officers of the 14th Regiment of 
Foot, who died respectively in 1802 and the year after. This 
calls to mind the fact that the English established a garrison at 
St. Joseph, and that the barracks, long since demolished, were 
by the side of this quaint, unambitious green. 

There is a certain hideous memory associated with the 
military post of St. Joseph. In 1837 a number of the negro 
troops broke out into mutiny. They were led by a giant named 
Diaga, a savage of superhuman strength and the ferocity of a 
tiger. It was on the night of June 17 that the inhabitants of the 
town were awakened from sleep by a sound like the roar of wild 
beasts. It was the war cry of some two hundred and eighty 
desperate helots. As men barricaded their doors, and women hid 
in cellars, they could see through the cracks of the shutters the 
red glare of burning barracks, and could hear the rattle of 
musketry and the rushing by of many feet. 

The trouble was soon over. D^aga was taken, but not until 
a host of his followers had been shot down by disciplined troops. 
Daaga and two others of the ringleaders were condemned to 
death. Their execution remains a dreadful nightmare in the long 
daydream of this gentle town. It was on a morning in August 
that they died. On the hillside, close to the children's common, 
three graves had been dug in the red earth. The narrow pits 
faced to the east so that the morning sun fell aslant into them 
On three sides of a hollow square stood the men of the 
89th Regiment. On the fourth side were the graves. 



ST. JOSEPH. 71 

The scene beyond the awful square was as enchanting as any 
in the world. The absolute silence was at last broken by the 
sound of men, advancing to the music of the " Dead March." At 
the head of the procession three coffins were carried, then came 
the three mutineers in a line, with the giant Diaga in their midst, 
still scowling, still defiant, still spluttering curses. The three were 
clad from neck to foot in robes of white trimmed with a deep 
border of black. In marching they kept step instinctively with 
the muffled drums. The sun threw long and ghastly shadows 
of them on the gorgeous green across which the white figures 
moved. Behind the three came the firing party. 

Then, in a silence that was full of horror, the sentence of death 
was read. The chaplain stammered a prayer. Over the face 
of each mutineer a cap was drawn, but D^aga pushed his up with 
an oath, and with the fury of a beast at bay. " Was he a child ? 
Did he fear death or the thrice accursed English ? No. He 
would die uncovered so that they could see to the last the hate in 
his eyes ! " Men held their breath as the marshal's sharp words of 
command rang forth, " Ready I Present ! Fire ! " With the volley 
came the sound of three dull thuds on the earth, and then the 
rattle of the muskets was echoed back faintly from the smiling 
woods and the sunlit hills. Awed groups who stood expectant in 
the distant streets shuddered as though the echo had come from 
the nether world. 



72 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



xni. 

EL DORADO. 

From the summit of the hill of St. Joseph is a very wide view 
of the sea, and of the far mountains of South America. Seen 
through the haze of a cloudless noon, these mountains are pearl 
grey, unsubstantial and mysterious. Many have, no doubt, been 
fascinated by the prospect, but there was one Englishman, long 
j^ears ago, who was absolutely transfigured by the contemplation 
of the scene. 

It would not be unreasonable to suppose that Raleigh obtained 
his first clear survey of these mountains from the hill of St. Joseph. 
He had come from very far to see them ; he had pictured them in 
his brain a thousand times as he brooded in his study at Sher- 
borne. These were the uplands of El Dorado. Somewhere 
beyond the heights was the city of unfathomed wealth. It was all 
to be his and his Queen's. 

He knew whereabouts the city lay, for he had studied many 
descriptions of it. He was learned in the fabulous geography of 
the land. He doubted nothing that he had read, and little that he 
had heard. He was as certain of the existence of the golden town 
as he was of the locality of Paris. He was as sure of its streets of 
gold as he was of the golden plain of buttercups in the meadows 
by Sherborne. 

If the imaginative Raleigh could have seen into the future, 
as he gazed westwards, he would have beheld, in place of the 
spires of the wondrous city, a headsman's block in the clouds, for 
this very vision was to lead him to his ruin. He was lured once 
again to this fateful coast, but with his second coming his earthly 
voyagings ended. His sailing days were over. He had hoped, 



EL DORADO. 73 

when he turned homewards, to have laid the wealth of the world 
at his sovereign's feet, but his only welcome was from the crowd 
who waited in Old Palace Yard to see him die. 

El Dorado was a daring fiction of the sixteenth century. The 
country was situated, so the fable said, in Guiana, between the 
rivers Amazon and Orinoco. It was rich in all kinds of precious 
metals, and ablaze with priceless gems. Its chief city was Manoa, 
a place of great size and magnificence, reared upon the banks of 
Lake Parima. This mythical inland sea was 200 leagues long. 
So engrafted was the figment of El Dorado upon the minds of 
men that the great lake Parima found a place on all sober maps 
up to the time of Humboldt The houses in Manoa were covered 
with plates of gold. Temples and palaces were there of dazzling 
splendour, together with immense statues and thrones of solid 
gold. Indeed this metal seems to have been even too abundant 
in the city, for billets of gold were reported to be lying about in 
heaps in the byways, like faggots of wood stacked for the winter 
fire. There was also near the town a superb garden of pleasure, 
wherein was every imagined delight 

Numerous expeditions had been made to this surprising 
country before the time of Raleigh's coming, but, lamentable to 
say, they had all failed with more or less hideous disaster. One 
enthusiast of the name of Philip von Hutten believed that he had 
caught a sight of the golden city. If he did it was only in the 
delirium of fever, yet the fancy led on further hordes of stumbling 
men, who pressed forward to the phantom city until they fell dead 
by the way of arrow wounds, starvation or disease. 

The chief authority on El Dorado was a Spaniard known as 
Juan Martinez, who declared that in 1534 he had spent seven 
months in Manoa with considerable enjoyment Martinez was 
quite a simple man, a mere " master of the munition," yet his 
name will live for ever as that of the most fertile liar the world 
has known. He was conducted, he said, from Manoa to the 
Spanish frontier, blindfolded, but laden with treasure of every 
kind. Of this wealth he was robbed before he reached the coast 
He had, therefore, no souvenirs of Manoa to show to his friends and 



74 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

no precise knowledge to give them of the route to the city. On 
his way home he reached as far as San Juan in the island of 
Puerto Rico. Here in a hushed chamber' he died, surrounded by 
all the comforts of religion. 

It was when he was on his deathbed and "without hope of 
life" that he gave to the holy men about him his account of 
Manoa. This wonderful story fell from his failing lips after he 
had received the sacrament. Possibly the monks added a little 
to the tale ; possibly it was wholly their invention ; possibly they 
misconstrued the mutterings of the dying man altogether, as he 
babbled of a city of pure gold, of " a wall great and high " that 
was built of jasper, of streets that " had no need of the sun," of 
the river of life clear as crystal. It may be that the last half- 
whispered words uttered, when the world had already faded from 
his tired eyes, were such as these — " the fifth, sardonyx ; the sixth, 
sardius ; the seventh, chrysolyte ; the eighth " 

It matters little upon whom the mantle of Ananias may have 
fallen at Puerto Rico ; the story, as it came to Sir Walter Raleigh, 
was after this fashion. About the year 1534 an expedition of 
630 men set out to discover El Dorado under the leadership of 
Diego Ordas. In this company was Martinez the wonder-teller. 
The enterprise ended in rueful failure ; Ordas was murdered and 
nothing — not even a nugget of ■ gold — was discovered. During 
the unhappy journey Martinez incurred the wrath of his leader to 
such a degree that Ordas turned him adrift in a canpe to sink or 
starve as he liked. Martinez, as he glided down stream in the 
empty boat, was captured by Indians in a manner approved of in 
every tale for boys. The natives took him to Manoa as a curious 
creature they had caught in the woods. He seems to have been 
exhibited as a freak, as if he had been a bearded woman or a 
two-headed ox. Whether he was shown in a booth sitting on 
those gold billets which were so common in the town, or whether 
he was invited to parties and bazaars to amuse the smart people 
of Manoa matters little. He saw all there was to be seen and 
treasured every astonishing item in his mind. 

He seems, as a man of taste, to have had a curious concep- 



EL DORADO. 75 

tion of what constitutes " the height of luxury." This realisation 
of supreme bliss was to be witnessed whenever Manoa was 
honoured by a state banquet. On such occasion, says the soldier 
of fortune, " all those that pledge the Emperor are first stripped 
naked and their bodies anointed all over with a kind of white 
balsam. When they were anointed all over, certain servants of 
the Emperor, having prepared gold made into fine powder, blow 
it through hollow canes upon their naked bodies, until they be all 
shining from the foot to the head ; and in this sort they sit 
drinking by twenties and hundreds, and continue in drunkenness 
sometimes six or seven days together." 

There are still people who regard the prospect of being drunk 
for a week as the consummation of happiness, the Nirvana of their 
ambition, but they are people of the baser sort. These gilded 
youths and men of Manoa who rolled about the palace for a week, 
giggling and hiccoughing, and leaving greasy dabs of gold on the 
marble as they lurched from court to court, were generals and 
governors, privy councillors and ministers of state. It is a quaint 
idea of an earthly paradise — the nakedness of the Garden of Eden, 
gold dust and grease as at once a concession to modesty and a 
token of magnificence, the unlimited drink, the presence of the 
king. The only reasonable feature in the picture is the severe 
simplicity of the court dress. 

Raleigh left England with five ships in February 1595 to 
discover this pleasant country of Juan Martinez. The year before 
he had dispatched a respectable pirate, one Captain Whiddon, 
" a man most honest and valiant," to Trinidad to collect informa- 
tion. Raleigh, on his arrival, after examining the shores of the 
green islet and visiting the Pitch Lake, anchored off San Jose de 
Oruna. He determined to take that town and to capture Berreo, 
the governor of the island. His excuses for the assault were the 
following : In the first place Berreo had treacherously captured 
eight of Whiddon's men ; secondly, he had treated the natives 
with vile cruelty, had loaded certain princes with chains, and 
then tortured them by dropping boiling fat upon their bare 
shoulders. The third reason, however, was the real one. Berreo 



76 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

had already led an expedition into Guiana, and would no doubt 
be full of useful knowledge. 

Sir Walter therefore went ashore one dark night, crept up 
the Caroni river, and took San Jos6 at the break of day, just 
as the humming-birds were busying themselves in the governor's 
garden. He found five melancholy princes chained together 
in a row and nearly dead from famine, while on their royal backs 
were the remains of the last application of hot fat. He set fire 
to the little town, and went down the hill happy and chuckling 
to himself, for he had Berreo with him, alive and communicative. 

Raleigh left his ships at Trinidad and crossing to the main- 
land in small boats proceeded to ascend the mighty Orinoco. 
There was never a more romantic river voyage ; never a more 
rapturous wild-goose chase. Raleigh was infinitely gullible. He 
believed every word the romance-loving Spaniards told him, 
as if he had been a gaping schoolboy. He trusted Juan Martinez 
as a modern traveller trusts Baedeker. He gathered inspiration 
and assurance from any dull-witted Indian who nodded " yes " 
to the unintelligible questions of his interpreter. 

Every sign was a happy omen. He toiled up the fetid, 
pestilential river radiant with delight. His men died of starva- 
tion and fatigue, but Manoa was ever just beyond the next bend 
of the stream. Ten more strokes and the first golden water-gate 
would be in view. His boats were rotting, yet he could hear 
every night the bells ringing in the spires of the gorgeous city. 
Whatever he came upon was delightful. " I never saw," he 
writes, " a more beautiful country . . . every stone that we 
stooped to take up promised either gold or silver." The birds 
that flew over the dismal stream were the most lovely he had 
ever known : " birds of all colours, some carnation, orange tawny,' 
purple, green, watchet,^ and of all other sorts both simple and 
mixed." He met with no kind of encouragement, and yet the 
smile of delight never left his face. Once they came upon 
a kindly chief who entertained them in his village ; upon which 
happy occasion " some of our captains garoused of his wine till 

• Orange tawny was Raleigh's own colour. " Pale blue. 



EL DORADO. 7; 

they were reasonable pleasant." This was the best time they 
had experience of. 

At last even Raleigh could go no further. His men were 
listless with the heat, parched with fever, and so utterly weary 
that even the prospect of lying arunk for a week in a tavern 
of gold failed to stir their jaded muscles. They could not pull 
another stroke in this lukewarm river. They could scarcely sit 
upright on the scorching thwarts, and would have given the whole 
land of El Dorado for one hour of a keen north-east wind 
blowing over the downs of Dorset. 

Raleigh owned to no failure. When he reached home he 
spoke of Manoa as if he had seen it He writes that the country 
would yield to the Queen "so many hundred thousand pounds 
yearly as should both defend all enemies abroad and defray all 
expenses at home." He implores his " Lady of Ladies " to put 
forth her hand and grasp this land of untold riches. He even 
ventured to assert, with the precision of an auctioneer, that one 
of the famous statues in Manoa could not be worth less than 
100,000/. When he turned back on the river it was with no sense 
of lack of success. Writing cheerily, and in his same pretty 
manner, he merely says, "It is time to leave Guiana to the sun 
and steer away towards the north." 

Poor self-befooled Raleigh, he left more gold in this miserable 
country than he ever brought away from it, for he gave to any 
loquacious chief who would listen to his babblings an honest 
English sovereign — a piece of " the new money of twenty shillings 
with her Majesty's picture." It would have indeed been well 
for the gallant dreamer if he had left Guiana for ever to the sun. 



78 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XIV. 

THE HIGH WOODS. 

So prodigal in the tropics is the growth of all things green that if 
the good folk of Port of Spain were to march out of their town 
on a certain day and not come back again until five years had 
passed they would find the place lost in jungle, the familiar 
streets blocked with undergrowth, the tram-lines faint streaks in 
the moss, and the church hidden beneath creepers. 

A drift of luxuriant green, some fathoms deep, covers the 
whole island, silting up the valleys, making level the ravines, and 
bridging over each smaller river so that it creeps through the 
shadows like a snake. This wealth of green pours down from the 
hills into the town, " a waterfall of leaf and glowing flower." It 
penetrates everywhere, through the outskirts, like a lava stream* 
It trickles into the very streets. It is hard to keep it at bay. 
Let a road be closed and in a while it becomes a meadow of 
weeds. Let a garden be deserted and it at once relapses into the 
savagery of a tangled wood. There are no bare places in the 
tropics. Even the rock that stands up like a bleached bone will 
find some kindly leaf to cover it. 

The country around Port of Spain is eminently beautiful, 
a wonder of valley and peak, of purple shadows, of soft gullies full 
of blue haze, of splashes of brilliant colour. Looked down upon 
from a height it is the country of an epic, the land of the 
primeval romance, majestic, solemn, unconfined. Here is an 
unclimbable crag covered with trees to its summit, not with lean 
pines or starving larches, but with the pampered trees of a summer 
wood. On its height should be one of those precipice-walled, 
many-turreted castles that Gustave Dor^ loved to draw. Here is 
a valley, like the Maraval valley, where the road roams through 



THE HIGH WOODS. 79 

a tunnel of bamboos, where the path is strewn with flowers as if 
a procession of gallants had just passed by, where the stream by 
the wayside is so domed with foliage that the noise of its water on 
the pebbles seems to come from underground. 

There is many a mountain pass in Trinidad. Of the view 
from the summit of one of these Kingsley has written in this wise : 
" We were aware, between the tree-stems, of a green misty gulf 
beneath our very feet, which seemed at the first glance boundless, 
but which gradually resolved itself into mile after mile of forest, 
rushing down into the sea. The hues of the distant woodlands, 
twenty miles away, seen through a veil of ultramarine, mingled 
with the pale greens and blues of the water, and they again with 
the pale sky, till the eye could hardly discern where land and sea 
parted from each other." ^ By the sea is often a windy beach 
along whose sands a line of lanky cocoanut trees will stretch away 
for miles. They ever wave their arms in the breeze as if signalling 
to someone at sea. In a stifling bay, where the water is still, and 
where the very shadows are stagnant, is a mangrove swamp. The 
roots of the tree are as the meshes of some cunning net, its 
tentacles grope seawards like the arms of an octopus. From the 
mud it spreads in will bubble up a fetid gas with a sound like the 
gurgle of drowning men, while the sludge it covers is alive with 
slimy things. 

There are still in Trinidad wide tracks of uncultivated land 
where flourishes " the forest primeval." This is the country as it 
met the eyes of the first adventurers, the pathless jungle which so 
fascinated Charles Kingsley that he writes reverently of his first 
visit to the High Woods (as these forests are called) " I have seen 
them at last " ! 

It was near Sangre Grande, under the kindly guidance of 
Mr. Lickfold, that I made my acquaintance with the High Woods. 
The world-old jungle is almost impenetrable. Those who would 
traverse its perplexing depths must follow the method of the early 
explorer, and hack a way through with a cutlass. So compact is 
the undergrowth that no trace of the ground is to be seen. For 

^ At Last : A Christmas in the West Indies x London, 1871. 



8o THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

all one could tell the mass of verdure may, like a sand-drift, 
cover the ruins of cities. Out of the tangle of green rise huge 
spectral trunks, struggling to reach the sky to breathe, struggling 
to rid themselves of the web of creepers, vines and parasites 
which cling to them and drag them down, as the snakes did 
Laocoon. Ropes forty feet long dangle from the topmost boughs, 
and it only needs Jack-o'-the-Beanstalk to climb them and tell of 
the wonders to be seen upon the sunny side of the great canopy 
of leaves that shuts the daylight from the world. 

There are church-like aisles hung with festoons of lianas as if 
with rags of votive banners which had fluttered there a century. 
Aerial bridges of creeper-stems swing up aloft from bough to 
bough over chasms laced and wreathed with an entanglement of 
green. There are violet-black gaps in the palisade of trees which 
reveal unimagined depths. In many a dark arbour in the bush 
some West Indian Merlin may have lived, while the golden auriole 
that darts out of the shadow might be the spirit of the dead 
magician. 

In this drowsy land the air is hot, heavy and stifling, 
" breeding," as Raleigh says, " great faintness." Were it not for 
the brilliant butterflies and moths that glide to and fro one would 
imagine it was too dense with damp for winged things to fly in. 
The dim green light is as that of moonlight. The sounds in the 
woods are strange, for the leaves are strange and their rustling is 
unlike that heard in any English spinney^ The cords that are 
dropped from the skies, like the strings of an iEolian harp, must 
utter still more unwonted notes whenever a wind finds its way into 
these steamy shades. Through the dancing haze, through the 
languorous vapour that fills the forest as with the smoke of 
incense, through the fume of dead leaves there comes ever a 
strange hum of life, the drone of insects, the rustle of the darting 
lizard, the flutter of hurrying wings. 

The vegetation of the tropics is profligate and extravagant. 
A West Indian jungle shows to what excess the libertinage of leaf 
and stem may reach. Everything in this spendthrift forest is 
immoderate and exaggerated. The undergrowth is to a man 



THE HIGH WOODS. 8i 

what a plot of weeds is to a hiding mouse, or what the woods of 
Brobdingnag were to Gulliver. Here is a creeper that covers half 
an acre. Here is a plant like a violet in its form, but it would 
shelter a child. Here is a geranium leaf, but it is shining and stiff 
and measures two feet across. This bush might be made of parsley- 
were it not so magnified that it rises to the height of many feet. 
This thicket suggests a clump of bracken, yet such is the size of 
every fern-like fan that it would hide a dozen horsemen. These 
woods of Munchausen, these gardens of the megalomaniac are 
very wonderful, but they are wearisome by their persistent in- 
temperance and parade. 

I think that the most beautiful tree in this part of the world 
is the Bois Immortel. It is found in the cacao plantations, where 
it shades and shelters the cacao bushes. Hence its name " Madre 
de Cacao." In the cool weather the Immortel becomes bare of 
leaves — a rare occurrence in the tropics. Its stem and boughs 
being grey they look, as they stand out of the green thicket, 
wintry and dead. Suddenly, so it seems, the whole crown of the 
tree becomes covered with marvellous blossoms, with delicate 
flowers of coral red or ruddy orange. This mass of palpitating 
colour lifted aloft in the sun against the blue sky is a marvel to 
see. The name is not to be wondered at. The skeleton tree rises 
from the verdant earth like a figure of death, and when it seems 
utterly withered, a blush of radiant petals covers its barrenness 
and so it breaks into life again. 

Before leaving the High Woods I am reminded that a lady of 
Sangre Grande showed me much of that beautiful country and, 
amongst other things, a new cemetery of which the village folk 
were proud. She told me that the first body buried in this ground 
was that of a coolie baby whose parents had adopted Christianity. 
Coffins being costly the dead child had been placed in a deal box 
in which tinned milk had been shipped to the island from Europe. 
As the sorrowing relatives shuffled round the grave, the lady 
noticed that there was an inscription upon the lid of the would- 
be coffin. On looking closer she observed that it read, in heavily 
stencilled letters, as follows : " Stow away from boilers." 

G 



82 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



XV. 

THE FIRST WEST INDIAN TOURIST. 

The first British tourist to the West Indies was undoubtedly 
Robert Duddeley, Earl of Warwick and Leicester, Duke of 
Northumberland, Knight of the Garter and, in a general way, 
" Leiftenante of all her Majestie's fortes and forces beyonde the 
seas." ^ 

He went like other tourists primarily to enjoy himself and to 
see new lands. Incidentally he did a little pirating on the way, 
but only as an amateur. He indulged in piracy in a proper 
tourist spirit, and not with any idea of making money by the pursuit 
He no doubt felt that on this particular trip it was the right thing 
to do, just as the winter visitor to Norway feels compelled to take 
to ski-running. In the same mood the tripper in Egypt wears a 
tarboosh and allows himself to be shaken into a jelly on the back 
of a Bank Holiday camel. 

It may be said at once that Robert Duddeley, as a pirate, had 
little sport. The only Spanish vessel he fell in with on the voyage 
out hoisted English colours, and escaping into shallow water 
jeered at the tourist ship and taunted the crew with mockery and 
depraved language. "The which," writes Captain Wyatt, who 
commanded the pikemen, " our generall toke mightelie offensive." 

The pirate duke had every reason to be annoyed with these 
coarse, low men, for his grace was proud and very dignified and 
ceremonious. For example, when his ship approached a strange 
vessel to do battle Wyatt says that they always " caused the collers* 
of our countrey and of our generall to be advansed in the topps, 

' From the admirable reprints of the Hakluyt Society. '^ Colours. 



THE FIRST WEST INDIAN TOURIST. " 83 

poope and shrowdes of our shipp." More than that the 
" trumpetts " took up their place " on the top of the master's 
cabbin." Anyone looking down from the poop would have seen 
" every gunner standinge by his peece." On the poop would be 
the noble duke himself, in his best armour, with the ribbon of the 
Garter across his chest, a baton in his mailed hand and plumes in 
his helmet. After all this parade it is no wonder that his grace 
considered it mightily offensive of the Spaniard to get out of 
harm's way and then grin over his bulwarks at him and indulge in 
contemptuous laughter and obscenely expressed chaff. 

Robert Duddeley, like the present-day tourist, started from 
Southampton at the commencement of the holiday season — viz. 
in November. This was in the year 1594. On November 6, 
according to Captain Wyatt, "hee caused his shippinge to disanker 
from the Rode afore Hampton." The " shippinge " consisted of 
the Bear, the Bear's Whelp and two small pinnaces named the 
Frisking and the Earwig. 

On the return journey, by the bye, they did not make their 
port with the precision of a mail steamer, for they " fell by reason 
of most extreme mistie weather in with a fisher towne called 
St. Jiues in Cornwall." 

The Bear reached Trinidad on January 31, 1595, and dropped 
anchor in Cedros Bay, some distance south of the Pitch Lake. 
The experiences of the tourists during the first four days of their 
sojourn in the island are worthy of record. 

On February i, a Saturday, they sent a boat ashore to confer 
with the natives. The conference was satisfactory, for " the daie 
followinge, being Sondaie, in the morninge came the salvages with 
two canowes aborde us." They amiably bartered food for beads 
and fish hooks and no doubt for hawk's bells. Now it so happened 
that one "salvage" could speak Spanish. It was unfortunate, for 
it led to trouble. The mischief began when the accomplished 
native told the duke of a gold mine along the coast. Although 
it was Sunday the general must needs send Captain Jobson and 
others ashore to see this property. After trudging eight weary 
miles in the sun Jobson came upon the ore and brought some of it 



84 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

back in his pocket. The mineral was bronze-yellow in colour, and 
the duke, after he had eagerly handled it, pronounced it to be fine 
gold. Their fortunes were made. 

It may here be stated that the nugget the happy tourist 
gloated over and locked away in his velvet-lined cabinet was 
a specimen of marcasite, a form of iron pyrites about as valueless 
as road metal. 

After a sleepless night, devoted to the contemplation of the 
high calling of a millionaire, Robert the tourist resolved to take 
possession of this gold mine which Providence and the " salvage " 
had placed in his hand. He did this, as he did all things, with 
the utmost ceremony. On Monday morning he landed in full 
armour with all his soldiers. As he placed his ducal foot upon 
the beach the men drawn up along the shore fired " a vallew of 
small shot," to which the Bear in the offing respectfully answered 
" with ten peeces of the great ordenance." The troops were 
then paraded and inspected, as is still the custom when royal 
personages land upon strange soil. 

The march to the mine commenced. It was a solemn 
procession. The duke in person led the way. With him was, no 
doubt, that " salvage " who had the gift of tongues, and who was 
probably secured by a rope round his neck. Unfortunately, the 
route was by the margin of the sea, through very soft sand. It 
was a march to be remembered ; a tramp along a furnace-hot 
beach which gave way under each step, with the noonday sun of 
the tropics overhead and not a scrap of shade as wide as a man's 
hand to temper the glare. One can see the staggering figure of 
the leader, clad in glistening mail too warm to touch, with a 
helmet on his head, and in his heart a pride so great that he 
dared not lift the casque from his shoulders. He must have 
dripped like a leaky iron tank as he stumbled along, and if 
prickly heat seized upon him while he dragged one heavy foot 
after the other out of the sand he cannot but have felt that the 
way of millionaires is hard. The journey was little better than 
a penance, although they trudged along cheered by " the noyse of 
trumpetts and drome." 



THE FIRST WEST INDIAN TOURIST. 85 

At length, writes Wyatt, "having marched VIII longe miles 
through the deepe sandes and in a most extreame hott dale, our 
Generall, unaccustomed, God he knows, to walke on foote, leading 
the march, wee at length came unto the place wheare this ore was, 
and havinge placed our courte of garde in a convenient place and 
sett forth our centronells, all the rest were appointed to the 
gatheringe of ore." 

That gathering of ore must have been a sight worth seeing. 
They may in after years have thought of it as wool-gathering, but, 
for the moment, the wool was the Golden Fleece. Purple-faced 
men, who had been talking of flagons of beer all the way, forgot 
their thirst, forgot even to mop their streaming faces, forgot 
to shake the sand out of their shoes, and falling down upon their 
knees proceeded to stuff their pockets with this paltry stone. To 
the envy of the " centronells," who stood motionless in sight, they 
would hide lumps of the yellow rock in their doublets, drop pieces 
down their necks, slip fragments up their sleeves, until they must 
have rattled like a boy's bag of marbles. 

Every piece was an item in a fortune. This lump would buy 
for one pimply soldier the village alehouse and the cider orchard. 
This handsome lad, who had jammed a particularly fine piece of 
rock into his breeches, felt assured that it would enable him to 
marry Dolly when he landed at Hampton, where he and she 
could live happily ever after. One fragment of stone was to 
make an old mother comfortable, another was to pay for a boy's 
apprenticeship, a third would buy a comrade out of prison, while 
every nugget meant some comfort and ease for the rest of each 
man's journeying. What a day of dreams ! What a building of 
castles in the air ! A crowd of crawling, scrambling men all 
grubbing up happiness with their hands, all finding in the dirt 
their heart's desire, all radiant that the world was well with then* 
at last. 

Poor perspiring, finger-sore simpletons, they would have been 
better engaged if they had been picking up lumps of coal. Still, 
the joy kept with them until they reached their homes. Then 
came a drama, grim and oft-repeated, the tragedy of the gold- 



86 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

smith's shop, the nugget dragged proudly out of the much-handled 
pouch, the smiling sweetheart on her lover's arm, with visions of 
a happiness beyond imagining, the guffaw of the goldsmith who 
would give a groat for a cartload, the weeping girl at the closed 
gate of Paradise, and the cursing soldier hurling a yellow stone 
into the stream. 

In the meanwhile things were not quite comfortable at the 
gold mine. The tide had come up and covered the track, so there 
was nothing to do but wait for the ebb. " Our generall," says 
Wyatt, " peceavinge a most filthie miste to fall, caused an armefull 
of boughes to be cutt and laide on the grownde, wheraeon he 
himself lay downe ; over whome Ancient ^ Barrow helde his 
collers,^ and Wyatt made his stande rownde about him." Lord 
Duddeley must have been grateful for this rest, as well as for the 
opportunity of removing his armour so as to rid himself of those 
insects which still trouble visitors to Trinidad. It must have been 
a picture to impress the " salvage " : the peer recumbent in the 
silent forest with his stockinged feet projecting from under his 
cloak, with the family banner held over his head by a yawning 
ensign, while the guard stood around, their figures bulging at every 
point with blocks of iron pyrites. 

The distinguished tourist had not been long asleep when the 
" centronells " raised an alarm, and in a moment all was confusion. 
The valiant general sprang to his feet, and " with xx shott " 
rushed into the treacherous woods to seek the cause of this dis- 
quietude and panic. It proved to be due to a firefly. Wyatt thus 
explains the position, it being only necessary to add that the fire- 
arm in those days was discharged by a glowing match or fuse : 
" For theare is a certain flie which in the night time appeareth 
like unto a fire, and I have seene at the least two or three score 
togeather in the woods, the which make resemblance as if they 
weare soe manie light matches, the which I perswade myselfe gave 
occasion of some soden feare unto the centronells which gave the 
alarum." 

Probably there was no more sleep for anyone after this, for 

' Ensign. '- Colours. 



THE FIRST WEST INDIAN TOURIST. 87 

when the tide went down the party marched back to the ship in 
tlie cool of the dawn. 

Nothing now remained but to take formal possession of the 
mine. This was accomplished on the very Tuesday on which the 
gold seekers returned to the ship. Robert Duddeley did not 
undertake this duty in person. He had had enough exercise for 
the moment. Another walk, in the sun, of sixteen miles in full 
armour through soft sand was almost more than any gold mine 
was worth. So he stayed on the vessel, and no doubt had his 
breakfast in bed. He did not, however, spare either his officers or 
his men, as Captain Wyatt's account of the solemn function will 
show. "This morninge, beinge Twsedaie, our Generall caused 
our Queenes armes to be drawne on a peece of lead and this 
inscription written underneath, the which was sett upon a tree 
neare adjoyinge unto the place wheare this myne of gold ore was 
discovered." The inscription sets forth in Latin and at great 
length that " Robertus Duddeleius, Anglus, filius illustrissimi 
comitis Leicestrencis," etc., had descended upon the island and 
had taken it in the name of that most serene princess Queen 
Elizabeth. 

The General entrusted the carrying out of the ceremony to old 
Captain Wyatt. Furthermore, he handed to the captain his own 
sword, as a sign that that officer had authority to act in his 
general's behalf, "joyninge with him in commission Mr. Wright 
and Mr. Vincent." These three gentlemen, full of bustle and 
importance, landed once more on the blazing beach, and taking 
with them a formidable body of troops, started again on the 
purgatorial journey of sixteen miles. 

" Marchinge forth in good order," writes the cheerful Wyatt, 
"wee came unto the place wheare this our service was to be 
accomplished, the which wee finished after this sorte : first 
wee caused the trumpetts to sownde solemlie three severail times, 
our companie troopinge rownde; in the midst marched Wyatt, 
bearinge the Queenes armes wrapped in a white silke scarfe edged 
with a deepe silver lace, accompanied with Mr. Wright and Mr. 
Vincent, each of us with our armes, havinge the general I's collers 



88 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

displaid, both with the trumpetts and the drome before us, after 
the chiefest of the troopes, then the whole troope, thus marchinge 
up unto the top of the mounte unto a tree the which grew away 
from all the rest, wheare wee made a stande. And after a generall 
silence Wyatt red it unto the troope, first as it was written in 
Latin, then in English ; after kissinge it hee fixed it on the tree 
and havinge a carpender placed alofte with hammer and nailes 
readie to make it faste, fastned it unto the tree. After wee pro- 
nounced thease wordes that ' The Honorable Robert Duddeley 
sonn and heyre unto the Right Honorable Robert Earle of 
Leicester, etc., etc., doth sweare, God favoringe his intent, to make 
good against anie knight in the whole world.' " No knight 
having responded to this challenge the proceedings concluded 
by more sounding of the trumpets and the drum and a general 
yelling of " God save our Queene Elizabeth." 

There is no doubt that it was an imposing function, made 
especially brilliant by the sunlight of the tropics. The men, I 
suppose, were in some such costume as is preserved in the present 
uniform of the Yeomen of the Guard. Captain Wyatt and his 
colleagues, Mr. Wright and Mr. Vincent, would be in shining 
armour, while it is sure that " the collers," as they waved in the 
breeze, made a bravery against the azure sky. There would be 
many flies buzzing in the air, the land crabs would come to the 
mouths of their holes and stand there in amazement, while the 
pelicans in the bay, unnerved by the sound of the trumpets and 
drum, would cease from their fishing. It may be surmised that 
the "salvages" who peeped out of the woods were much 
interested in the purple-faced " carpender " who, hanging over 
a bough head downwards with his mouth full of nails, was doing 
such strange things with the "peece of lead." I expect that 
some agile " salvage " took down that piece of lead as soon as 
Duddeley's ships were out of sight and sold it to the first pirate 
who was looking about for something to melt into bullets. 



XVI. 

THE PITCH LAKE. 

There are some things the traveller finds it hard to avoid. 
Among them is the Pitch Lake at Trinidad. This spot has been 
described as one of the " wonders of the world " ; it was visited by 
Sir Walter Raleigh, who caulked his ships from its strange depths, 
while it is supposed to realise some features of those infernal 
regions of which so much has been written in proportion to what 
is known. It happens, therefore, that any traveller who, having 
landed at Trinidad, fails to see the Pitch Lake, must be prepared to 
be for ever assured that he has missed the one thing worth seeing 
in the New World. 

Froude is among the few who have boldly defied the temptation 
to look upon this spot. He has declared in writing, and with 
evident pride, that he " resisted all exhortations to visit it." 

The lake is situated near La Brea, a poor village on the west 
coast of Trinidad, some thirty-six miles from Port of Spain. The 
journey thither is, under ordinary conditions, tedious, being 
effected partly by train, partly by steamer and partly on foot. 
My visit to the lake was rendered both agreeable and interesting 
through the kindness of Mr. Bartlett, the manager of the company 
which is at present in possession of the wondrous pool. 

Starting in a launch from Port of Spain we landed at Brighton, 
where is a pier from which the asphalt is shipped. The land 
thereabouts is low and commonplace, the beach a narrow line of 
sand, the bay alive with pelicans. There are curious things on the 
shore, in the form of boulders of pitch which have oozed up 
through the sand from the mysterious abyss, as if they were the 
" casts " of some awful worm. They have been polished by the 



90 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

sea into shining globules of jet, some of which are fringed with 
green weed — the strangest rocks to be seen upon any coast. 

One associates asphalt with city streets and tramways, so it 
is strange to see lumps of it among the common objects of the 
seashore, and providing a resting-place for pelicans. Everything 
about this quaint seaport has some community with pitch. The 
piles of the pier are caked with pitch, the pavements are of pitch, 
as is the solitary highway, the black child sitting on a pitch 
boulder is nursing a doll made of pitch. 

The lake is about a mile from the shore on slightly raised 
ground, surrounded by scanty jungle and a number of Moriche 
palms. The first impression of the visitor when he looks down 
upon the famous pool must be a little influenced by the accounts 
he may have read of it So many authors insist upon comparing 
the place with the Hades of the ancients. Even Kingsley speaks 
of it as " an inferno," as a " Stygian pool," as " the fountain of 
Styx," and " thinks it well for the human mind that the pitch lake 
was still unknown when Dante wrote his hideous poem." There 
are writers who tell vaguely of smoke and flames, as well as of 
sulphurous smells. It is little to be doubted that the name of the 
place is in some measure answerable for these impressions. It 
recalls the lake " which burneth with fire and brimstone " on the 
one hand, while boiling pitch has- always held a prominent place 
in the diabolical menage. If the locality had been called " the 
asphalt flat " it is probable that none of these fancies would have 
fluttered into the minds of men. There is nothing Dantesque 
about asphalt ; indeed, the spot, if less unfortunately named, 
would no more have suggested the inferno than would a lake of 
Portland cement 

The visitor to La Brea will see neither flames nor smoke, nor 
anything boiling, nor will he be helped in other ways to realise the 
awfulness of the stream by Charon's ferry. The place is by no 
means terrible nor awe-inspiring. It is as bare of the poetic 
afflatus as is a coal-merchant's yard. The poet of Florence might 
have gazed upon it unmoved, although Kingsley believes that it 
would have suggested to him " the torments of lost beings sinking 



THE PITCH LAKE. 91 

slowly in the black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic 
sun." 

As a matter of fact, people can only sink in the lake with 
difficulty and with infinite patience. A man who attempted 
suicide by this process would die of starvation and boredom 
before he had sunk much above his knees, and to get even so far 
he would have to be pertinacious. 

When I saw the lake there was but a solitary man upon it, 
near about its centre. He was a coolie squatting on the pitch on 
his hams, washing clothes in one of the many little puddles on the 
lake's surface. 

If a Londoner would realise the Pitch Lake, he must imagine 
the pond in St. James's Park emptied of water, its bottom filled 
with asphalt, pools left in places, and some tropical vegetation 
disposed about the margin of the depression. Such a landscape 
would only inspire in the susceptible conceptions of the scenery 
of Hell. 

The Pitch Lake, when I first caught sight of it, had exactly the 
appearance of the ultimate creek of an estuary at low tide. I saw 
a wide fl.at of a hundred acres, wherein were runnels of water 
which may have been left by the ebb, large stretches of what 
appeared to be mud dried by the sun, and a few small islands 
covered with brush. The mud was pitch, the water was rainwater, 
the islands were genuine. 

When the brink of the lake was reached there was no 
suggestion of the bank of that river where shuddering souls must 
wait for a crossing. It looked more like the edge of a pond near 
a great city which had been frozen over, but the ice of which had 
been dulled by the dirt from many boots. I stepped from the 
grass on to this surface with just as much caution as one would 
employ in placing a foot on suspicious ice. It might have been 
slippery but it was not. In a few moments, after jumping across 
some waterways, I was in the middle of the lake walking on the 
asphalt of commerce valued at so much per ton. 

The sensation that walking upon this substance gave was 
no other than that of treading upon the flank of some immense 



92 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

beast, some Titanic mammoth lying prostrate in a swamp. The 
surface was black, it was dry and minutely wrinkled like an 
elephant's skin, it was blood-warm, it was soft and yielded to 
the tread precisely as one would suppose that an acre of solid 
flesh would yield. The general impression was heightened by 
certain surface creases where the hide seemed to be turned 
in as it is in the folds behind an elephant's ears. These skin 
furrows were filled with water as if the collapsed animal were 
perspiring. 

The heat of the air was great, the light was almost blinding, 
while the shimmer upon the baked surface, added to the swaying 
of one's feet in soft places, gave rise to the idea that the mighty ' 
beast was still breathing, and that its many-acred flank actually 
moved. 

I am told that the full extent of the pitch-bearing area is 
no acres, and that its exact depth is unknown. The asphalt is 
not bailed out as the readers of some guide-books might suppose, 
nor is it dug up. It is hooked out in junks with a pick, each 
piece separating from the mass with a dry bright fracture like that 
of a blue flint. The lump so delved from the " Stygian pool " is 
lifted up with the hands and thrown ignominiously into a truck. 
These trucks run on rails and sleepers across the lake. The rails 
and sleepers of the " permanent way " sink slowly into the solid 
pitch, so that once in every three days they have both to be raised 
up and readjusted on the surface. 

On each side of the trackway there will be a trough or trench 
produced by the labours of the men with the picks. This trough 
rapidly fills again level and solid, is again dug out only to close in 
once more. It thus comes about that although the asphalt is 
being removed at the rate of 100,000 tons a year, the lines of rail 
need never to be altered in direction. 

The lake, like the Burning Bush, is not consumed ; the furrow 
remains ever unfinished ; the task is as hopeless as the ploughing 
of sand, and is one that might well have wearied even Sisyphus, 
the roller of the ever-slipping stone. Day by day, month by 
month, year by year, the lake presents the same strange picture of 



THE PITCH LAKE. 93 

men toiling at a trench which as they pass along only closes up 
behind them. 

As they leave their work at sundown they look back at a 
gully cut across the black morass, but when they come to the 
brim of the lake at dawn they find that all is level again, and that 
the ditch, the labour of a day, has vanished. 

It is said that many women, when inquiring as to the origin of 
a product, will be satisfied with the answer that it is " made by 
machinery " ; so there are many people who are ready to believe 
that any terrestrial phenomenon is to be explained by " volcanic 
action." To " volcanic action " the formation of the Pitch Lake 
has been ascribed, but, unhappily for this conclusion, there is no 
trace of volcanic energy in the Island of Trinidad. 

The origin of the asphalt is identical with that of mineral oil. 
Indeed, pitch would appear to be no other than oil which, owing 
to a peculiar geological disposition, has become inspissated in 
a convenient basin or evaporating dish. 

There are subtle movements in this unrippled pool ; the 
islands wander aimlessly from shore to shore like undecided 
ghosts ; the trunk of a tree will rise out of the phlegmatic lake 
and after pointing for a while skywards, as if it were a warning 
finger, will withdraw into the black depths again. These 
movements, and the curiously inturned creases on the lake's 
surface are explained by convection currents and not by 
subterranean influences. To the same commonplace cause is 
ascribed the filling of that heartless trench which no spade can 
empty. 



94 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



xvir. 

THE BOCAS. 

Who has not heard of the famous Bocas of Trinidad, of those 
wild sea-passes which lead into the Gulf of Paria? One gate- 
way guards the approach by the north, another that by the south. 
It was by the southern Boca, the Serpent's Mouth, that Columbus 
came, but it is not notably picturesque. The northern passage, 
on the other hand, the Boca del Drago or Dragon's Mouth, 
is magnificent to behold. At this end of the bay Trinidad comes 
nearest to the mainland, while the strait is further narrowed by 
three islands which stretch in a line across the dividing sea. The 
belt of water is thus broken into four channels ; that to the west 
is the Boca Grande, then come the Boca de Navios (the Way 
of Ships), the Boca de Huevos or Egg Passage, and finally the 
Boca de Monos or Monkey's Channel. 

Of these the Boca de Monos is the most imposing. It is 
a narrow, echoing channel, some three cables wide, hemmed 
in between forbidding precipices, which rise on one side to the 
height of a thousand feet. Down this ocean defile a great tide 
rushes, circling in mad eddies. The mighty flood as it lifts itself 
over a hidden reef shows a huge curved back above the stream 
as if it were some glistening sea monster. A grey rock with a 
dead tree on it stands alone in the fairway, where the rollers fall 
upon it with the force of a battering-ram. The Boca de Monos 
is best seen from the open sea about the time of sun-down. The 
cliffs, sheer and ominous, are then in shade. They stand upon 
either side of the defile, flanking it like pylons at the entrance to 
a temple avenue. It is a solemn and majestic portal, and the 



THE BOCAS. 95 

first trembling ship that was whirled down the pass might well 
have wondered if beyond was the Sea of Death. 

It was through this Boca that Columbus went out when he 
sailed away from Trinidad. The pass is a place for baffling winds, 
but his ungainly, unmanageable ships were hurried through, like 
driftwood, rolling to this side and that, the sails flapping, the 
yards swinging until the braces snapped, the helmsmen powerless, 
and each man crossing himself and muttering prayers. Many 
and many a buccaneer has crept through this sea alley, hoping 
to find a fat merchantman dozing in the sun in the bay. Many 
a tempest-chased craft has been swept through this channel 
as helpless as a child's boat in a mill sluice, to be dashed to pieces 
on the rocks, or to find peace in the land-locked gulf beyond. 
Through the southern Boca came Raleigh in the small boats 
which were to carry him to El Dorado ; he in an old galley with 
benches to row upon, the others in two wherries, a barge and 
a ship's boat — one hundred men all told. 

Of the many remarkable craft that have passed through the 
Dragon's Mouth the most remarkable appeared off the entrance 
to the channel on June 7, 1805. It was no small company that 
hove in sight that day, for it was made up of thirteen battleships — 
viz. ten sail of the line and three frigates. They approached the 
Boca with every stitch of sail set. It was evident that they were 
in hot haste. At every masthead flew the British flag. Most 
curious, however, was the fact that every ship was cleared for 
action, every gunner was standing by his piece, the magazines 
were open and piles of arms for boarding were heaped upon the 
decks. This was the more strange because the Gulf of Paria, save 
for a few fishing boats, a trader or two and many pelicans, was 
empty and the picture of confiding peace. 

The first ship to pass the Boca had on her stern the name 
Victory and on her quarter-deck a British admiral, a spare 
man of middle age who had but one arm and one eye — Horatio 
Nelson. Never did any adventurer show such an eagerness as he 
did to get a glimpse of the shipping in the Gulf of Paria ; never 
was a man so disappointed when he found the great haven empty. 



96 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The tale of that surprising voyage, told already many times, may 
be told again, for it is never to be forgotten. 

In the spring of 1805 Nelson had been long watching the 
French fleet around the southern coasts of Europe. On March 
31 the entire French squadron under Admiral Villeneuve slipped 
out of Toulon harbour and vanished. Nelson, although much 
hampered by bad weather, searched every bay on the French and 
Spanish seaboard, and scoured the Mediterranean from one end to 
the other. 

Early in May the conviction seized him that the French had 
gone to the West Indies. On May 11 he set off on the chase. 
Villeneuve had forty days' start of him. He reached Madeira in 
four bustling days — no news. With every sail drawing he 
pressed on to Barbados, made Carlisle Bay on June 4, only to 
hear that the French were at Trinidad. 

Away he flew to the south. The scent was hot. He would 
catch them in the Gulf of Paria. No better place could be wished 
for : the battle that was ever in his mind would be the battle of 
Port of Spain. It was in this spirit that, three days later, he came 
foaming through the Bocas, cleared for action. He found the 
anchorage deserted. A despatch boat sent into the harbour of 
the town came back with the news that the fleet was at Grenada. 

Round swung the English ships in a twinkling and before the 
town folk had ceased to marvel they were through the Bocas again, 
heading north and leaving the quiet gulf once more to the fisher- 
men and the pelicans, Grenada was sighted on the 9th and every 
eye was strained to catch a glimpse of the crowd of masts. The 
roads were empty, but the news bellowed from the quay was good 
— the French were off to Antigua. 

A fierce English cheer rang through the little harbour and 
Nelson, like a hound who had met a check, was away again and 
heading for Antigua ; for Antigua was near to Nevis where he first 
met his wife and where, indeed, he was married. Breathless and 
savage the ships luffed up off the island on June 12, but Villeneuve 
was not there. He had gone to Europe, so the people at the port 
told the pursuers. 



THE BOCAS 97 

Never for a moment had the chase flagged, yet never so far 
had the sea-dogs a sight of their quarry. Hot-foot they had come 
from Europe to the West Indies ; now they were on their way 
back to Europe again ; eight thousand good sea miles, out and 
home, and a heavy pressure of canvas all the way. 

Nelson left Antigua on June 13. On June 21 he writes in his 
diary : " Saw three planks which, I think, came from the French 
fleet." On July 19 the Victory and her companions dropped 
anchor in the harbour of Gibraltar. On July 20 there is this 
entry in the admiral's book : " I went on shore for the first time 
since June 16, 1803, and from having my foot out of the Victory 
two years wanting two days." 

The chase that commenced on May 11 ended on October 21 
off Cape Trafalgar, where the great battle, that had been for half 
a year in Nelson's thoughts, was won. So the chase ended well. 
The honour of England was upheld and the weary sea-rover was 
at last " home from the sea." 

The Victory is still afloat in Portsmouth Harbour, the very 
same Victory that came roaring through the Boca on that day in 
June. There in the simple cabin are the windows from which 
Nelson took his last look of England, lying dim in the wake of his 
ship. There is the deck he paced for so many harassing days. 
Over these very bulwarks he leaned, looking out for the hunted 
fleet. There, last of all, is the dingy corner in the cockpit where, 
propped up against the good old vessel's beams, the most gallant 
of British admirals drifted out into the Unruffled Haven. 



H 



98 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



xvni. 

THE FIVE ISLANDS. 

One of the most pleasant ways of seeing the northern Bocas is by 
means of the steamer which plies between Port of Spain and 
Chacachacare, the outermost of the three islands which form the 
channels. 

On the passage the vessel calls at the Five Islands. These 
dots of land form one of the most picturesque groups to be met 
with in this world of islands. They are all very small, all very 
green, all have grey, tide-worn cliffs, while on each is a fascinating 
villa with a red, or striped, roof and white walls. One little isle is 
so minute that it is entirely taken up by the house that crowns 
it — a Venice within the circuit of a child's garden. 

The settlement is given up wholly to enjoyment. It is a sea 
sanctuary for the hot days of summer. It is the idler's archipelago. 
The islands are those of the nursery tale, and of the Willow 
Pattern Plate. Send a boy there with a boat, a fishing-rod and 
a bathing-dress, and he would believe that he had found the 
Hesperides of his classical studies. He will find tiny coves and 
dark caves where he can " go a-pyrating," miniature beaches, six 
paces wide, to land his treasure, a jungle the size of his school- 
room, and a cape that he can sit astride of. His sister will be 
enamoured of the arbour by the sea, of the stone stairs leading up 
from the landing-place, of the doll's-house terrace, and of the blue 
pool so close below her window that she can almost touch the 
water. 

Beyond the Five Islands and near to the Boca de Monos is 
the island of Gaspar Grande. On the point of it are the remains 
of the Spanish fort which the British had set their hearts upon 



THE FIVE ISLANDS. 99 

taking when Harvey and Abercromby anchored off the island on 
February 16, 1797 (see page 65). The fort is at the opening into 
Chaguaramas Bay, a bay of entrancing loveliness. Here, on the 
day named, four Spanish line-of-battle ships were lying, together 
with a gun brig. 

The English were busy all night making preparations for the 
taking of the fort and the capture of the ships. At two in the 
morning the tree-covered cliffs around the bay were illuminated 
by a wild column of flames. The Spaniards had set fire to their 
vessels, and in the glare the water was seen to be dotted with 
boats all rowing for the shore. Out of the five men-of-war the 
English saved but one, the San Damasco. The rest were burned 
to the water's edge. When the daylight came the fort on Caspar 
Grande was found to be deserted. 

To any who may be interested in pelicans the Five Islands 
and the bay that saw the burning of the ships may be commended. 
These pelicans are curiously ungainly birds who, although puffed 
up with self-satisfied wisdom, have an aspect of extreme and 
shabby old age. Apparently overlooked in the progress of 
evolution they have become so obsolete as to be ridiculous, for 
they ought long ago to have retired into the fossil state. To be 
consistent with their environment they should be hovering over 
a lagoon full of saurians or should be watching from a swamp the 
dull movements of palseolithic man. 

They fish and with surprising success, but in the most uncouth 
and primitive manner. They flap to and fro over the sea with an 
assumption of boredom, then suddenly drop into the water and 
come up with a struggling fish. There is no suggestion of diving, 
no pretence to the graceful art of the gannet. They simply 
tumble into the sea, with their wings open, like an untidy parcel. 
That they reach the water head first seems to be purely an 
accident. 

The well-known legend of the pelican and her indiscreet method 
of feeding her young in times of stress was in ancient days often 
employed to point a moral lesson to the young. The modern 
schoolboy or girl remains unmoved by the recital of the pelican's 



lOo THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

virtues. John Sparke, in his account of Hawkins' second voyage, 
thus describes the devotion of the bird and adds some criticism 
upon the appearance of the misguided fowl which is in accord 
with the average mariner's estimate of female qualities. " I 
noted," he says, " the pelican, which is feigned to be the lovingest 
bird that is, which, rather than that her young should want, will 
spare her heart's blood out of her belly ; but for all this lovingness 
she is very deformed to behold." 



XIX. 

A GLANCE AT THE MAP. 

From Trinidad, twice in the year, a special steamer starts for a 
cruise among the West Indian islands. Before embarking upon 
such a voyage it is well to take a glance at the map, in order to 
appreciate the remarkable disposition of land and sea in this part 
of the globe. 

A crowd of islands, arranged in the form of a sickle, extends 
from the point of Florida to the north-east of Venezuela. They 
are of every size, ranging from an island larger than Ireland to a 
mere rock an acre in extent. They form a series of stepping- 
stones between North and South America, the summits of a 
submarine causeway joining the two continents, and the founda- 
tions of a breakwater which, if complete, would make an inland 
sea of the American Mediterranean. 

This immense stretch of water, formed by the Gulf of Mexico 
and the Caribbean Sea, is, even now, nearly land-locked. To 
cross it at its greatest length would compel a journey further 
than that from Liverpool to New York, while the voyager who 
followed its sea borders would skirt the coasts of Florida, Texas 
and Mexico, the length of Central America, the northern shores of 
the southern continent and the whole sweep of islands from 
Trinidad to the Bahamas. At his journey's end he would have 
travelled 12,000 miles. 

On the west this Mediterranean ocean is closed by solid land 
— closed until the Panama Canal is completed — but on the east 
there are many gaps in the sea wall, as well as four wide ways 
that lead out into the open Atlantic — viz. by the Anegada channel, 
by the Mona and Windward Passages, and by the Straits of 



102 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Vucatan. Through these waterways, through every chink in the 
colossal masonry, through every runnel between the Titanic stones 
pours the Gulf Stream on its way to the north. Between Jupiter 
Inlet on the coast of Florida and Memory Rock in the Bahamas 
the stream is at its narrowest, but even here "it represents a 
moving mass equal to about three hundred thousand Mississippi 
rivers." ^ 

Those who are learned in the tale of the days when the earth 
was young, say that a tract of mountainous land did once stretch 
all the way from Florida to Venezuela, and that the islands 
became islands partly by a sinking of the land and partly through 
the upheaving of volcanoes. They say also that there was a time 
when a man could walk from Jamaica to the mainland and find 
himself at Cape Gracias a Dios, for even now there are shoals 
along that way, such as " Pedro Bank," " Seranilla Bank " and 
" Thunder Knoll," as well as rocks and cays upon which the sea 
breaks in heavy weather. These rocks which mount out of the 
sea, as they once lifted themselves up into the clouds, are the 
needle points of everlasting hills, so that a little cay with only a 
poor tuft of samphire on it might be the pinnacle of a submerged 
Matterhorn. 

Many of these shallows, by the way, have names that provoke 
great curiosity. Who, for instance, was the lady made immortal 
by the " Rosalind Bank " ? Was she a sea-rover's wife who, 
although she may lie in a forgotten churchyard by the English 
Channel, will yet live so long as there is a chart of the Caribbean 
Sea ? Who, too, was " Old Isaacs " after whom an unpleasant 
shoal near the Grand Cayman was named ? Was he the shuffling 
old inan who waited on the captain and who was the butt of the 
ship, or was he a troublesome money-lender at some such easy- 
going spot as Port Royal ? 

The Grand Cayman, it may here be said, is a small, low-lying, 
tree-covered island belonging to Great Britain. It does a trade in 
turtles and cocoanuts, rears cattle, and boasts of a prison and 
other evidences of civilisation. It is a colony perched on the 

' Cuba and Porto Rico, by Robert T. Hill, page lo : New York, 1903. 



A GLANCE AT THE MAP. 103 

pinnacle of an isolated submarine mountain whose northern slope 
is 10,662 feet high, while on the south the depth from the streets 
of its little town to the solid earth is 20,568 feet, or nearly four 
miles. If the sea were to drain away, as did the snow from 
around Baron Munchausen's church steeple, then would George 
Town, the capital of the Grand Cayman, appear on the very apex 
of a mountain which (viewed from its southern valley) would be 
nearly a mile higher than Mont Blanc. 

There are deep seas in this part of the world. In crossing a 
pool to the north of Puerto Rico, for instance, a ship would have 
27,366 feet of water beneath her, so that if a coin were dropped 
overboard it would have to travel more than five miles before it 
reached the bottom.^ 

Of the individual islands it is only necessary to say that the 
Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, San Domingo, Puerto Rico and 
the Virgin Archipelago) rest on a common submarine bed and 
are fragments of a continent through which runs, from west to 
east, a mountain chain. 

These are the Leeward Islands properly so called, the " Islas 
soto viento " of the Spanish because the north-east trade wind 
blows so constantly from the eastward throughout the year and 
because they lie, in relation to the other groups, to the west. 

The Windward Islands stand away towards the rising sun and 
are known most usually as the Lesser Antilles or Caribbee Islands.^ 
Finally there is a group of islands called the Coast Islands. 
They were included by the Spanish in the " Islas soto viento," and 
are to be regarded merely as detached portions of the coast of 
South America. They extend from Tobago to Oruba.^ 

The islands which are most closely concerned with the present 

' The height of Mt. Everest is, for comparison, 29,CXJ2 feet. 

' Unfortunately the Caribbee Islands are divided, for purely administrative purposes, 
into two groups, Windward and Leeward, which terms have no reference to the direction 
of the prevailing wind. 

* The chief of the Coast Islands are Tobago, Trinidad, Margarita, Tortuga, and 
Curajoa. Among them, too, is 

" the pleasant Isle of Aves beside the Spanish Main," 
sung of by Kingsley in his Lay of the Last Buccaneer. 



I04 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

voyage are the Caribbee Islands. They form a regular crescent 
from Sombrero, or the Spanish Hat, in the north, to Grenada in 
the south. Along a part of the crescent they range themselves 
into two lines — an outer and an inner chain — one facing the 
Atlantic, the other the Caribbean Sea. The outer row of islands * 
are built up of white limestone or coral rock and are all com- 
paratively low-lying, no point that they can boast of reaching 
1400 feet. With the exception of Antigua none of these islands 
show evidence of volcanic action. 

The inner or main line of islands ^ are the most interesting and 
picturesque in the archipelago. They are all of volcanic origin, 
are all crater heaps. Even the little Grenadines represent "the 
scattered fragments of a great volcano disrupted during some 
tremendous outburst in late Tertiary times." ^ They are precipitous, 
rising almost vertically out of the sea, and mount to great heights. 
The highest point, that of some 5000 feet, is attained by Morne 
Diablotin in Dominica. Some are mere crater cones, as are the 
islands of Saba, St. Eustatius and Nevis. Others present stately 
peaks and dim ravines, towering mornes and winding valleys. 

In these islands, so weird and so fantastic, the land has been 
rent and torn by awful forces, has been shaken by convulsions which 
must have sent a shudder through the great world, has been kneaded 
and moulded by terrific hands. The soil is dark for it is made up 
of ashes, of poured out lava, of piled up cinders and rocks. The 
rains of the tropics have gouged out river beds and. gullies, have 
made in one place a rich plain and in another a stagnant swamp. 
There are here no smooth, whale-back downs covered with gorse, 
no be-flowered water meadows, no white cliffs. In their place are 
mountain peaks hammered out upon the world's anvil into the 
form of prongs and pikes, together with ragged chines where the 
cup of the crater would seem to have cracked with fervent heat. 

* These are Sombrero, Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Bartholomew, Barbuda, Antigua, 
Oesirade and Marie Galante. 

^ These are Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Guadaloupe, Dominica, 
Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, the Grenadines and Grenada. 

• Keane, Central and South America, vol. ii. page 279: London, 1901, 



A GLANCE AT THE MAP. 105 

The very soil which is so fertile has been hurled up from the great 
furnace in the vaults of the globe. 

All these islands are covered with luxuriant vegetation from 
the wall of green at the water's edge to their mist-enticing 
summits. Their "woods are perpetually green as the plumage 
of a green parrot." ^ Their seas are ever a pansy-blue. " Their 
days have such an azure expansion, so enormous a luminosity that 
it does not seem to be our sky above, but the heaven of some 
larger world ... lit by the light of a white sun." ^ 

In the days when the islands were fashioned this corner of the 
world must have been the scene of an appalling spectacle. A 
curved line of volcanoes rising out of the sea, belching fire and 
smoke and cascades of ashes into the lowering skies. Each island 
a mouth coming up to breathe from the inner fire, a vent of the 
vast furnace thrust up through the deep. 

For long after the blaze had died away each round of land 
would be a mere black cinder cone. Then would come, borne by 
the birds and the winds, the germs of vegetation and the blush of 
green. Ferns and bushes would cover the harsh scars. Woods 
would climb to the very edge of the smoking crater. Fluttering 
wings would fill the solitudes with life. 

One night, among the trees around some quiet beach, a light 
would be seen and the red reflection of it would fall upon the 
water in the lonely bay. Then it would be known that man had 
come. 

• Lafcadio Heam, Life and Letters, page 424. 

* Ibid, pages 412 and 416. 



io6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XX. 

GRENADA. 

Grenada is the first island reached from Trinidad. The steamer 
finds its way into a small almost land-locked harbour which is one 
of the most beautiful in the West Indies. It is said to be the 
crater of an ancient volcano the seaward wall of which has been 
blown away, so that the water has poured in and filled the basin. 
It is through the breach that the ship steams to her moorings. 
Anyhow it is a homely haven, cosy and well sheltered from the 
sea. A curving bank of green hills covered with trees and gardens 
makes an amphitheatre, the arena of which is such a pool of blue 
water as can only be seen in these latitudes. 

On one side of the pool is the town of St. George's. The 
houses which compose it have white or grey walls and rust-red 
roofs. They clamber up the slope among the palms and balance 
themselves on the summit of the ridge, where, too, is a church with 
a square tower standing up against the sky. Beyond the town, on 
a spit of high land making for the sea is an old stolid grey fort. 
It was built by the French just two hundred years ago. Although 
long deserted it has still an aspect of great solemnity and im- 
portance, still the look of the grim watch-dog. There are now 
paths around its ponderous walls, and it is evident that children 
come here to play. They even put stones into the cannons' 
mouths as if they were teasing a giant of the soundness of whose 
sleep they were well assured. 

The town creeps down to the water's edge, to a foreign-looking 
quay with such warehouses and buildings on it as are seen along 
the wharf side of a French seaport. This is no matter for wonder 
since the place has been French for the greater part of its life. 



GRENADA. 107 

With the waterside houses are mixed up, in some strange way, 
the masts and rigging of white-hulled schooners and of trading 
sloops. From a further acquaintance with St. George's it appears 
that the town sits astride of the ridge as a rider sits on a saddle, 
and that the real capital is on that side of the slope which is away 
from the harbour. The road from the quay to the market-place is 
therefore over a bank so steep that some years ago the governor 
of the time drove a tunnel through the base of the ridge to the 
great comfort of the inhabitants and of their horses and mules. 

The town is picturesque and French. It possesses many old 
and dignified houses with ample roofs, great dormer windows and 
liberal sun-shutters. The central square, or market-place, might 
belong to any modest French town were it not for the black folk, 
the blaze of colour and light, the strange trees and the still 
stranger wares exposed for sale. 

The country inland is singularly fascinating. Its surface is 
that of the crumpled handkerchief of which Columbus spoke to 
his Queen, an extravagant jumble of verdant hills and valleys. 
It is wilder than Trinidad if, possibly, less luxuriant. Some call 
Grenada the Spice Island because of its nutmegs and other spices. 
It may as well be named the Island of Ferns by reason of the 
damp banks of moss and fern which line its tortuous roads. 

A good idea of the island, of its peaks and glens, and of some 
fragment of its coast line, can be gained by a journey to the 
Grand Etang, a large pool on the summit of a hill some 1740 feet 
above the sea level. The lake is distant from St. George's seven 
miles, and out of these steamy miles are six which are persistently 
uphill and as tedious as a road in Purgatory. The lake lies 
sunken in a deep hollow among the woods, which hollow is no 
other than the basin of an ancient crater. It may be Sleepy 
Hollow from its quietness. The crater is now a crater of leaves, 
for its steep sides, which were once a slope of cinders, are lined by 
rushes and palms and a closely standing company of sedate trees. 
The water is two and a half miles round and is impressive mainly 
by reason of the great tankard it fills and of the utter solitude in 
which it sleeps. The negro, with an exercise of imagination 



io8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

which he rarely displays, calls the pool " The Home of the Mother 
of the Rains." 

There is on the northern coast a height named Le Morne des 
Sauteurs. It is said that the French, when they came to Grenada, 
ill-used and robbed the Caribs whom they found on this island of 
spices. Through many a sordid year they hunted them down 
until, in the end, the few who remained were hounded to the top 
of this hill. There the harried, starving band of islanders made 
a stand. The French closed in upon them. The cruel circle 
narrowed until the way back even to the burnt cabins was cut off. 
Nearer and nearer the bushes rustled as they were bent aside by 
the shoulders of advancing men. Here was a hand pushing a 
branch out of the way ; here the gleam of a cutlass. Murder was 
creeping upon them like a creeping fire. Before them was the 
kindly sea, blue, tranquil and limitless. The time of farewell had 
come, so from the top of the precipice — as from the jutting brink 
of the world — they leapt into the air and in such wise the last of 
the race found peace. 



XXI. 

THE FAIR HELEN OF THE WEST INDIES. 

No island in these waters will be approached with greater interest 
and expectancy than the island of St. Lucia, This is not on 
account of its winsome beauty, although there are many who hold 
it to be the loveliest spot in this gorgeous crescent. It is not by 
reason of its size, for it covers an area less than that of the county 
of Middlesex. It has no natural features to make it remarkable, 
unless they be certain sulphur springs and the towering rocks 
known as the Pitons. Yet for centuries little St. Lucia was the 
most important island in the West Indies. As such it looms 
majestically in the history of these troubled seas. To the many 
who strove to find a footing in the archipelago, St. Lucia was ever 
the key to the attainment. In every fresh scheme of conquest the 
little island was the goal to be reached, the guerdon of the con- 
queror. Hold St. Lucia, and the rest may perish ! 

There can hardly be a spot that, for its size, has played a more 
stirring part in the history of arms or in the chronicles of the 
British navy and army. There is no dot of land that has been so 
desperately fought over, so savagely wrangled for, as this too fair 
island. St. Lucia is the Helen of the West Indies, and has been 
the cause of more blood-shedding than was ever provoked by 
Helen of Troy. Seven times was it held by the English, and 
seven times by the French. For no less than one hundred and 
fifty years it was the arena of the most bitter and deadly strife. 
Whenever war broke out between England and France, the call 
that at once rang out in the west was ever the same: "To St. 
Lucia ! To St. Lucia ! " 



no THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The panic-ridden town of Castries has seen more of the 
storming of heights, of the rushing of trenches and of the battering 
of forts, than any town across the seas. It has witnessed gladia- 
torial combats that would have thrilled the Colosseum at Rome. 
Here at St. Lucia is that spit of land, La Vigie, the look-out, 
where the watchman, whether French or English, never slumbered 
nor slept. Here are Gros Islet and Pigeon Island, made memor- 
able by Rodney as the scenes of his dashing sea-story. 

Here, too, is that ever famous hill, the Morne Fortune, which 
for a century or more was the height around which every battle 
raged. Whoever held the Morne Fortune, the Lucky Hill, held the 
island. It would be hard to tell how many times it was stormed, 
how often the English took it, and how often the French. 
Assuredly can it be said that within no like ring of ground do the 
grass and the brambles cover a greater company of British dead. 
It hides the French dead also. Every patriotic Frenchman is proud 
of the Morne, for the soldiers of that gallant country made the hill 
as renowned for deeds of valour as did the men they fought with. 
How many memories, cherished in the hearts of mothers, wives 
and sweethearts, must have clung about this " green hill far 
away " ! Even yet there must be, hidden away in old bureaus, 
letters with the faded heading, " Morne Fortun6." Some of these 
would narrate, with all the glee of a lad, how the boats landed, 
how the slopes were rushed, and how, to the cheering of his 
company, the famous Morne was taken. Lucky Hill ! Other papers 
in more formal writing would tell how the lad had sickened and 
grown silent, how he had longed for little more than news from 
home and an end to his miseries, and how, at last, his company 
had carried him away and buried him on the side of the Luckj 
Hill. 

As the steamer is nearing the harbour it may be well to scan, 
in the briefest summary, the remarkable chronicles of this islana. 

In 1605 some English colonists landed out of the Olive 
Blossome, which had recently been advancing the empire in simple 
fashion at Barbados (page 7). In less than two months these 
enterprising folk were massacred by the Caribs. 



THE FAIR HELEN OF THE WEST INDIES, in 

In 1635 the king of France generously granted to Messieurs 
Latine and Du Plessis "a// the unoccupied lands in America." 
They modestly selected Martinique, leaving St Lucia for the time 
to the unappeasable natives. 

In 1639 the English again attempted to establish a colony on 
the comely island, but the adventurers were promptly massacred 
or scattered by the Caribs. 

In 1642 the king of France ceded St. Lucia and other islands 
to the French West Indian Company. The company being 
composed of needy speculators effected little ; although in 1650 
they succeeded in selling St Lucia and Grenada to Messieurs 
Houel and Du Parquet for 1660/., obtaining in this way some 
desirable ready money. Du Parquet in the following year erected 
a fort and in spite of angry opposition from the natives founded 
an uneasy settlement of forty colonists. 

In 1660 the French and English conspired together to wheedle 
the island from the now confiding Caribs. This noble work accom- 
plished, they fell out between themselves and began that struggle 
for the possession of the island which lasted for one hundred and 
fifty years. 

In 1664 a party of English from Barbados landed at Anse du 
Choc and wrested the island from the French. In 1667 by the 
treaty of Breda it was restored to France again. 

In 1722 George I., apparently out of bravado, granted St Lucia 
to John, Duke of Montagu. It was an unkind gift That nobleman 
tried to possess himself of his property but failed very lamentably. 

In 1728 both the British and the French held such strong 
positions on the place that, in order to save further bloodshed, 
they agreed to regard St. Lucia as neutral. By the treaty of 
Aix-la-Chapelle it was formally made neutral, but in spite of 
agreements and treaties the fighting never ceased. 

In 1756, on an outbreak of war with France, St Lucia was 
captured by the English. In 1763, by the treaty of Paris, it was 
restored to France. The French now put the island in order and 
moved the chief fort from La Vigie to the hill which was destined 
to become so famous as the Morne Fortund 



112 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

In 1778, England being again at war with France, the two 
fleets made for St. Lucia with all press of sail. The British arrived 
first. The Morne Fortun6 was stormed and St. Lucia was once 
more in the hands of the English. 

In 1 78 1 the great French fleet under De Grasse bore down 
upon this unhappy settlement with no less than " twenty-five sail 
of the line." They landed at Gros Islet and made a desperate 
attempt to seize the island, but the enterprise failed. In 1783, by 
the treaty of Versailles, St. Lucia was handed back once more 
to the French, 

In 1794 the English, under General Grey, landing at various 
spots, took the Morne Fortune at the point of the bayonet. The 
British flag was planted on the summit by the Duke of Kent, 
the father of Queen Victoria. Late in the same year Goyrand 
made a sudden onslaught and seized St. Lucia for the French, 
gaining all but two forts. In the following year the English were 
ignominiously driven out of the island by Victor Hugues, the 
friend of Robespierre. In their flight they left their women 
and children behind. These unhappy people were, however, sent 
to Martinique by the French under a flag of truce. 

In 1796 a large British force under Sir Ralph Abercromby 
and Sir John Moore stormed the Morne Fortun6 and, after much 
desperate fighting, captured it. In 1802, by the treaty of Amiens, 
St. Lucia was again given back to France. 

It will be noticed that, throughout these many changes, 
the English had the better of the fighting and the French of the 
diplomacy. 

Finally in 1803 Commodore Hood came in hot haste to 
St Lucia and anchored in Anse du Choc Bay. The island was 
held at the time by General Nogu^s. La Vigie and Castries 
were easily taken by the British, whereupon the French general 
retired to the Morne Fortune and refused to surrender. The 
Morne was stormed at 4 A.M. on June 22 and in less than an hour 
the works were carried at the point of the bayonet with small loss 
to the attacking force. With the storming- party was the gallant 
Sir Thomas Picton, the hero of Badajoz. 



6i° 



CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA 



English TVliles 




Foureur I. a 



Vigie Pt., 



Longitude West 6i°of Greenwich 



Emery Wallcer sc. 



THE FAIR HELEN OF THE WEST INDIES. 113 

In 1 8 14 the fair and fickle St. Lucia was finally ceded to Great 
Britain. 

St, Lucia as approached from the sea is as dainty and beautiful 
an island as the heart could wish. Softly wooded to its highest 
peaks, there is nothing to suggest that it has been the firebrand 
of the West Indies, the island of strife, whose glades have been 
reddened with blood and whose slopes are riddled with the graves 
of valiant men. At the end of a verdant fiord, which would tempt 
any lazy holiday-maker, is Castries. This town receives its name 
from Marshal de Castries, who in 1785 was the French Minister 
of the Colonies. To the right of the entrance into the harbour of 
Castries is Cul de Sac Bay where the British fleet hid, in the 
famous attack of 1778, to the undoing of the French (page 115). 

Castries itself is quite at the water's edge, a squat, shy place, 
crouching at the feet of the circle of great hills which shuts in the 
far end of the inlet. The hill ahead is the Morne Duchazeau. It 
has a saddle-shaped summit with two faint peaks, one representing 
the pommel and the other the cantle of a rough-rider's saddle. It 
was to the top of this height that Abercromby dragged his guns — 
with what labour heaven knows — when he made his attempt on 
the Morne Fortun6 in 1796. The peak to the left is Morne 
Chabot, taken by Moore at the time of the same desperate 
assault The hill to the right is the most beautiful of the three, as 
well as the nearest to the town. It is very green, for it is covered 
with trees to the sky line, with plantain and cocoanut, with 
mango and bread-fruit. 

This is the never-to-be-forgotten Morne Fortund 



114 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



xxn. 

CUL DE SAC BAY. 

Castries harbour with its many capes and bays is protected on 
the north side by a spit of bare land which ends seawards in 
a hillock, shaped like the bowl of an inverted spoon. This is La 
Vigie, the look-out. Across this promontory is the bay called 
Anse du Choc, where eager armed men in crowding boats made 
so often a landing. Cul de Sac Bay, to the south, is a sheltered 
and pleasant inlet at the foot of the southern slopes of the Morne 
Fortune. It is a deep-water bay where the lead-line sinks to from 
ten to twenty fathoms. 

The haven was made memorable during the attack on the 
island in 1778. War had broken out between England and 
France, and with one accord the French and British fleets made 
all haste for St. Lucia. 

The English under General Grant had the good fortune to 
reach the island first, as has been already stated. Grant landed 
his men, to the number of 5000, in Cul de Sac Bay, and there 
he anchored his ships. As the French garrison was very small, 
the Morne Fortun6 and other forts were taken next day with 
practically no resistance. 

The French fleet carrying 9000 men, under Count D'Estaing, 
hove in sight a few days later, bearing for Castries under a cloud 
of canvas. D'Estaing was very happy. The island was so still, 
so peaceful, so unconscious that the signs of war were already in 
the skies. He would himself bring the news and with it good 
cheer to his long-banished comrades. He and his 9000 men 
would make the good old Morne impregnable, so that when the 
English came they would have a reception not easy to be 



CUL DE SAC BAY. 115 

forgotten, for he would cover the slopes of the hill with British 
red-coats. He could see that there were no ships in Castries 
harbour ; the well-beloved flag of France was flying at the point 
as well as on the mount. Unhappily he could not see into Cul de 
Sac Bay. 

One may be sure that the Frenchmen cheered as they came 
sailing into the harbour mouth. No sooner, however, were they 
within the shelter of the island than — with a puff of smoke and 
a thrust of flame — a clap of thunder broke out from La Vigie. It 
was a cannon shot. In a moment every gun in the fort was 
ablaze. It was no feu de j'oie, for deck houses were being 
shattered and bulwarks cut to splinters, while men, with a cheer 
for the French flag on their lips, were falling dead. D'Estaing 
found that he was in a trap. How had these accursed English 
got here ? With much confusion, jostling, and yelling, the ships 
were put about, and escaped from the net of the fowler to the 
open sea, 

As D'Estaing moved southwards he took a look into Cul de 
Sac Bay. There they were, snug enough, curse them ! Those 
were their hateful shouts that echoed back mockingly from the 
clifls of the haven. D'Estaing vowed he would sink them at their 
anchors, for in this land-locked cove they lay at his mercy — or at 
least .so he thought. He made a desperate attack upon the jeering 
ships from the sea, but they showed no disposition to sink at their 
anchors. More than that, these men who cheered so heartily 
actually drove him off. He tried again to crush them, but in the 
second venture he fared even worse. He determined then to land 
and to drive these obstinate trespassers from the island. With 
this intent he sailed north to Gros Islet Bay where he anchored 
and landed his troops on the ample beach. He marched his men 
towards Castries, resolving to take La Vigie and to bayonet the 
wretches who had manned those infernal guns. 

La Vigie was held by General Meadows with only 1300 men. 
Across the neck of land which joins the promontory with the 
mainland was a line of substantial entrenchments. The French 
advanced upon the trenches in three columns, a formidable body 



ii6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

of men. They came within musket range of the earthworks, but 
not a shot was fired by the English. In a silence which would 
have daunted the bravest they neared the still barricade. The 
defenders made no sign. It was not until the French were 
actually in the very ditch that the British responded. They niade 
answer with a heavy fire which poured down like a sudden hail 
upon the crowd of men in the fosse. The results were disastrous. 

The French, however, were not to be denied. As soon as they 
had reformed they charged the bank with fixed bayonets, but the 
British fire drove them back. They hurled themselves once more 
against the wall of gabions and piled-up earth. Once more they 
were beaten off. A third time, with angry shouts, they rushed 
upon the earthworks, helmctless, maddened, stung with wounds, 
every bayonet gripped with desperation. A third time they fell 
away under the murderous fire of the British. They retired out of 
musket range, halted, hesitated, and then, while bleeding men 
were crawling back out of the ditch, the bugle sounded the retreat. 
This gallant attempt upon La Vigie cost the French no less than 
400 killed and 11 00 wounded. 

D'Estaing had had enough. In ten days' time he had buried 
his dead, had got his wounded on board, and had sailed away out 
of sight 




CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA. 
The hill to the right is the Morne Fortune ; the saddle-topped hill on its left is the Morne Duchazeau. 




GRAVEYARD ON MORNE FORTUNE, ST. LUCIA. 



XXIII. 

THE MORNE FORTUNE. 

A WINDING road ascends from Castries to the summit of the 
Morne Fortund It is a road made gracious by many trees, by 
cocoanut palms, by a dell or a thicket here and there, and by 
glimpses of the sea. All who mount this steep way will find 
that, step by step, they are carried back into the past. It is a 
Via Dolorosa, a road of ghosts, a place more full of memories 
of a kind than are the heights by the Alma or the Ridge at 
Delhi. 

How many hundreds of men, French and English, have 
climbed this hillside with such ardour and breathless determina- 
tion and with such fervent light in their eyes that one would 
suppose they thought to find at the top some beatific vision ! If 
the wealth of the world had been there they could not have 
stormed the slope with more passionate eagerness. Yet there 
was nothing on the height but a mast from which hung a faded 
flag. 

The summit of the Morne is flat and of wide extent. There 
are still many old trees standing against whose trunks soldiers, 
French and British,- must have leaned while they smoked rare 
pipes and talked of the time when they would be home again, and 
of "cakes and ale." No traces are now left of the English 
cottages, of the green clipped hedges and smooth grass plats, 
about which Breen wrote some sixty years ago.^ So far as I am 
aware the famous " iron barracks " are now no more. These 
buildings were fearfully and wonderfully made in the year 1827, 

Si. Lucia, by H. H. Breen: London, 1844. 



I 



ii8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

and were designed to resist hurricanes. To what extent they 
succeeded in defying the elements the records are silent I can 
only find an account of extensive damage done to them by the 
earthquake of 1839. 

The Morne is now very largely occupied by immense barracks 
and storehouses of quite recent construction. They belong to 
that class of " Government building " in which the struggle to 
attain to primeval plainness and a surpassing monotony has been 
crowned with success. Defiant in their unblushing ugliness they 
remain as a monument of the time when the British Government 
determined to establish a naval and military station at St. Lucia. 
The huge brick structures which crowd both the Morne and La 
Vigie were promptly put in hand and were erected at a cost 
stated to be not less than two million pounds sterling. The 
precious buildings have never been occupied, nor indeed were 
they ever quite completed, for the Government, having expended 
the sum above named, changed its mind and decided, in its 
wisdom, that St. Lucia was not to be a military station at all. So 
the mighty pieces of ordnance sent out to further adorn the hill 
were at infinite cost and labour carried back again. The proceed- 
ing seems to have been inspired by an attempt to imitate that 
Duke of York who is credited in song with having marched a 
body of men to the top of a hill for the simple pleasure of seeing 
them march down again. 

Still, however, on the Morne are a few venerable buildings 
which belong to the old fighting days. Here, for example, is an 
ancient magazine constructed stoutly of stone, once white it may 
be, but now black with age. Its roof is covered with weeds, its 
walls and its ponderous buttresses with moss and ferns. It squats 
there like an old veteran of many wars, wrinkled, scarred and 
shaky with the weight of years. If its stones could speak they 
would be very garrulous no doubt, as is the habit of the senile, 
and would mutter of bygone days as well in French as in English. 
Probably the British were the first to use the magazine, yet it 
must have been a French soldier who rushed through the door for 
a last armful of ammunition. Here, too, is the old well with its 



THE MORNE FORTUNE. 119 

memories of blazing heat and thirsty men. There is a cannon 
with the date 18 18, but it would have arrived long after all the 
fighting was over. 

By far the most interesting object on the summit of the Morne 
Fortund is the ancient fort which commands its south-eastern face. 
This is the side immediately opposite to Morne Duchazeau. 
There can be little doubt but that it is the identical " fl^che " 
which played so conspicuous a part in Abercromby's attack upon 
the hill. The details of the venture are as follows : Sir Ralph 
Abercromby landed in Anse du Choc with 12,000 men on April 
26, 1796. With him was that Sir John Moore who thirteen years 
after was shot dead at Corunna at the moment of victory. At 
Corunna he was buried amidst surroundings which are made 
familiar by Wolfe's famous poem " The Burial of Sir John 
Moore." His portrait in the National Portrait Gallery shows a 
clean-shaven man with a face so good-humoured and hearty that 
he seems as if he must break into laughter. Moore first of all 
took Morne Chabot and then Morne Duchazeau — two out of the 
three hills which surround Castries. This he effected with the 
loss of only seventy men. Morne Duchazeau is the saddle-topped 
hill already described (page 113). It is 890 feet high, is steep and 
well-covered with trees and bushes. It commands the Morne 
Fortun6 which has an altitude of only 845 feet. 

Batteries were constructed on the summit of Duchazeau and 
then with fearful toil guns were dragged up the mountain side to 
the emplacements. It must have been a labour of Hercules. 
Imagine the hauling, pulling and pushing, the skyward-pointing 
guns, the creaking ropes that swung them from bending tree 
trunks, the shower of stones when the carriage skidded, the red- 
faced perspiring men in clammy shirts, the shouts ^nd the oaths, 
and around all the atmosphere of steam and flies ! It was a slow 
business as well as a hot one, but at daybreak on May 24 
Duchazeau opened fire on the Morne Fortun6. The guns did well. 
In due course Moore at the head of the 27th Regiment " stormed 
a fleche ^ which formed the principal outwork of the Morne 
* A fleche is defined as *' the simplest form of field fortification." 



I20 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Fortune towards the East." ^ He captured it and held it against 
two desperate attempts of the enemy to retake the position. By 
sundown the hill was practically in the hands of the English, and 
on the following morning the garrison of 2000 men laid down 
their arms. The 27th lost in this strenuous attack eight officers 
and eighty men. 

The old fort or fleche stands alone at the very edge of the 
hill, immediately facing Morne Duchazeau. In the col between 
the two heights is a connecting ridge along which Moore came at 
the head of the 27th Regiment. The fort is well built of stone, but 
is now so overgrown with grass and bushes that only in a few 
places can the masonry be seen. The works are in two tiers 
with a ravelin on one side. It must have been a desperate place 
to have reached, as any may judge who will descend to the foot 01 
the slope and then climb up to the fleche again. 

This quiet, gentle, green mound and ditch are gt-andly placed, 
and even now it needs no imagination to tell that he who led the 
assault upon such an eagle's aerie must have had a stout heart. 
It is, to-day, an utter solitude, hushed in eternal silence. Probably 
the last stirring sound that echoed round its walls was on that 
very day in May when, at sundown, the dirt-stained bugler of the 
27th Regiment blew the call " Cease firing." 

The view from the summit of- the Morne Fortune is a delight 
to the eye. Inland is a superb country of steep, soft hills, of black 
ravines and of valleys that lead far away into bays of. purple mist. 
Directly below, over the tree tops, are the roofs of Castries and 
the blue harbour. Beyond is the spit of land. La Vigie, lying on 
the sea as a model in clay would lie on a sheet of violet glass. 
Then comes a stretch of sea coast so enchanting that it might be 
the shore of a happier world. It ends in the famous bay of Gros 
Islet where Rodney anchored his fleet before the great fight of 
April 12, 1782, 

In the far haze is Pigeon Island, a pale, conical rock standing 
out of the sea. This is the little island that Rodney fortified to 
the great discomfort of the French, as well as the perch from which 

' Fortescue's History of the British Army, vol. iv : London, 1906. 



THE MORNE FORTUNE. i2i 

he watched, with such good effect, the movements of the enemy. 
Yet it is a place only three-quarters of a mile long and much less 
than that in width. It once had barracks for six officers and one 
hundred men, or for as many of the hundred as had survived 
death from yellow fever. 

A little way down the side of the Morne Fortune is the officers' 
cemetery. The road leading to it, which was once so well worn, is 
now overgrown with grass. Round about the cluster of graves 
is a thicket of sand-box trees, while beyond the trees is a home- 
suggesting stretch of open sea. This ever silent gathering place 
of the British is the most beautiful spot on the side of the hill. A 
number of the graves are blackened with age. Some are of stone, 
others of weather-worn brick. Most of them tell the same story — 
the roll-call of the Yellow Death, the major of this regiment or 
the lieutenant of that, and so many of them mere lads. 

The loss of life among the British troops in the West Indies 
and notably in St. Lucia, was in those days appalling. The 
majority of the deaths was due to yellow fever. After Sir Ralph 
Abercromby's attack on the Morne in 1796 Sir John Moore was 
left in command of the island with a garrison of 4000 men. This 
was in June. When November came the force had been reduced 
by yellow fever to 1000 fit for duty and 1500 sick.^ When the 
English were compelled to leave St. Lucia in 1795 among the 
total force of 1400 there were no less than 600 sick, nearly one- 
half, while on the very day of embarkation one officer and seven 
men died. 

The whole campaign, lasting from 1793 to 1796, resulted in 
" the total of 80,000 soldiers lost to the service, including 40,000 
actually dead ; the latter number exceeding the total losses of 
Wellington's army from death, discharges, desertion and all causes 
from the beginning to the end of the Peninsular War." ^ 

It was during the year 1794 that the mortality was the highest. 
Men were dying in numbers every day, in Guadaloupe at the rate 
of 300 a month. Of General Grey's original force of 7000 men at 
least 5000 perished in the course of this one year.^ Taking the 

' Fortescue's History of the British Army, vol. iv. * Ibid. ' Ibid. 



122 • THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

army, navy and transport together, writes Fortescue, "it is 
probably beneath the mark to say that 12,000 Englishmen were 
buried in the West Indies in 1794." 

The soldiers were badly housed and badly fed. Many were 
in rags. There was a lack of clothing, especially of boots ; a lack, 
not only of comforts, but of the simple necessaries of life. The 
Home Government remained unmoved and unmovable. Either 
from indifference or incompetence the Secretary of State did 
nothing. Grey wrote letter after letter, but without avail. At 
last he sends home a message with this pitiable sentence, " You 
seem to have forgotten us," 

In 1780 four newly raised regiments were ordered to Jamaica. 
They stopped on their way at St. Lucia, where they contracted 
yellow fever. By the time the transports reached Kingston 
Harbour they had lost 168 men by death, and had 780 on the 
sick list. During the course of the first five months, after the 
survivors had been stationed at Jamaica, iioo more had died of 
the fever and of other diseases. It was then that Dalling, the 
Governor, ventured to place the matter before the Secretary of 
State in a way that he thought would appeal to his intelligence. 
He writes as follows : " Considered only as an article of commerce 
these 1 100 men have cost 22,000/., a sum which, if laid out above 
ground, might have saved half their lives." 

It is, and always will be, a gruesome and discreditable story. 
If ever, on some silent tropical night, there should be heard again 
on the Morne Fortun6 the tramp of the sentry by the barrack 
wall and the challenge of the guard at the outpost, and if ever the 
stir of human life should waken among these blackened graves, 
the voice that would call from the summit of the hill would utter 
those reproachful words, " You seem to have forgotten us." 



XXIV. 

CASTRIES AND ITS PEOPLE. 

Castries, in spite of its chequered and unrestful history, is not 
interesting. It sprawls upon a flat at the foot of the hills, a poor 
meagre place, quite out of keeping with its superb surroundings. 
The houses are mostly of wood. Those who built them would 
appear to have been dissatisfied with the world, and to have had 
little heart to make their homes either comely or long-abiding. 
The quay, although gloomy with the coal-dust of half a century, 
can claim to provide a good background for the women folk of 
Castries who, when in their gala dress, are as gorgeous as red and 
blue macaws. There is a dejected square in the centre of the 
town which looks as if it were up for sale, ft has around it, 
however, some " ornamental trees " planted by Sir Dudley Hill 
about 1834, which help to cover its nakedness. 

Even now it would need a very unscrupulous estate agent to 
make it appear that Castries was a place of " desirable residence." 
In days not long gone by it was famous for its reckless death-rate. 
Its insalubrity was due to many things, to swamps which bred 
malaria, to yellow fever, to a contempt for drainage, and to the 
cheapness of a fiery drink called " white rum." 

The ill repute of the town was, according to Breen, ^ once 
made .^se of to dispose of an inconvenient guest. The historian 
of St. Lucia states that, early in the 'thirties, the bishop of the 
diocese, in the course of his tour, reached Castries. He was 
naturally asked to dine at Government House. The hour for 
dinner would probably have been about four in the afternoon. 
The Governor then in residence was a mean man who had many 

• St. Lucia, by H. H. Breen : London, 1844. 



124 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

reasons for not wishing to take the bishop and his suite into 
Government House. Apart from the mere question of economy the 
Governor's wife and family were in England and the establishment 
had been reduced to the barest possible compass. After dinner the 
Governor essayed to show the bishop over the building and in the 
course of the survey treated him, it may be imagined, to some such 
converse as the following : " This is the best bedroom, bishop. 
It was here that my predecessor died of yellow fever. You will 
remember him — a most genial man. Look out for this step in the 
passage ! We found it a very awkward corner for a coffin. This ] 
next room has a charming view of the sea ; the bedstead is a 
specimen of creole work. Poor old Colonel Smithson had his 
worst fit on that bed ; took two men to hold him ; poor dear man, 
he has now been paralysed three years. This third bedroom we 
call the red room : it gets the morning sun. I hope you admire 
the curtains, they came from England. Here poor Morris, my 
secretary, died. He seems to have got typhoid fever in the house, 
although we are most careful. A short illness, poor fellow ! I bought 
his horse, that roan you saw at the door. Now you must come 
upstairs and see the blue room and the fine outlook over the town. 
It was where poor Major Jones died when he was here on a visit. 
Abscess of the liver, you will recollect. Dreadful case! You could 
hear his groans down in the smoking-room." 

But the bishop did not want to see any more nor to hear any 
more. He ordered his horse and rode down into the town, reflecting 
as he went on the uncertainty of life — at least, in Government 
House. After he had gone the one man-servant probably found 
the Governor alone in the smoking-room chuckling to himself 
about " a house with a reputation." 

At set seasons Castries was liable to be raided by hurricanes, 
or to be paralysed by earthquakes. The householder in this 
peculiarly unquiet town was prepared at any time to see his roof 
torn away by a tornado, or his windows shaken like dust into the 
road by an earthquake, or a coffin carried into his door by callous 
men who " had come for the body." It is no wonder if the 
citizens became neurotic. " The slightest shock (of earthquake)," 



CASTRIES AND ITS PEOPLE 125 

writes Breen, " drives the people into the streets, throwing the 
gentlemen out of their windows and their wits, and the ladies into 
holes and hysterics." 

Never, indeed, could one find 

Calm and deep peace on this high wold. 

A body of looting soldiers in the streets duly heated with white 
rum, a rising of the negroes bent on arson and murder, or the 
bombardment of the Morne were events to be expected only from 
time to time, but never was there immunity from the snakes, the 
centipedes, the scorpions, the tarantulas, the mosquitoes and the 
wasps with which the island was overrun in Breen's time. 

St. Lucia will always be notable in books on natural history 
as the favourite haunt of that "abominable reptile" the Fer-de-Lance, 
or yellow viper, the "Death of the Woods." Of all venomous 
snakes this execrable creature is the fiercest, most aggressive and 
most deadly. The very name the " Yellow Viper " would seem 
to be as loathsome a title as could be invented for a living thing, 
and if a tenth of the stories told about it be true it deserves any 
ignominy. It has a low, flat head, triangular in shape. Its skin 
affects the yellow-brown tint of decomposition. " The iris of the 
eye is orange, with red flashes : it glows at night like burning 
charcoal. In a walk through the woods at any moment a seeming 
branch, a knot of lianas, a pink or gray root, a clump of pendent 
yellow fruit, may suddenly take life, writhe, stretch, spring, strike." ^ 

Castries is still distinctly a French town in spite of its long 
occupation by the British. The negroes talk a fearful patois, 
"a jargon of lop-sided French and maimed English, flavoured 
with the Ethiopian twang." A large proportion of them own to 
French names, but a negro's name is an uncertain guide as to the 
nationality he may have adopted. Breen furnishes an illustration 
of this. Monsieur Jean Marie Beauregard, a coal-black negro, 
comes to think Jean Marie too vulgar, so he takes to himself the 
more refined name of Alfred. His friends find Beauregard too 

' Two Years in the French West Indies , by Lafcadio Heam, pp. 56 and 57 : New 
York, 1890. 



126 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

long, so he becomes Monsieur Alfred and his wife Madame 
Alfred. In this manner an apparently new family is founded. 

The population of St. Lucia may be precisely described as 
" mixed " — mixed both as to nationality and colour. There is 
every tint of skin, from ebony to jessamine white. Picturesque 
mulattos are here of all grades of yellow or brown, fair Creoles 
who may claim descent from ancient French families, or who may 
trace their ancestry back to some adventurous Scots who left 
their villages in the Highlands at the bidding of the call of the sea. 

Certain black folk in St. Lucia are descendants of the Pass- 
parterres — the come-by-land people. They were refugees from 
Martinique, who fled from that island when it was French to 
St. Lucia when it was British. They kept secret the method of 
their escape from slavery as well as the means whereby they 
reached St. Lucia. " How had they come ? " asked the meddle- 
some and inquisitive. " They had come by land " was the 
courteous answer of the grinning stranger. Thus it was that they 
were called the Passparterres. As the English would never give 
these refugees up to the French, they remained free men and 
became, in many cases, desirable settlers and citizens. 

Breen had so long an experience of the West Indian negro, 
that his account of him is worthy of attention. He describes the 
black man as gay, good-humoured, docile and sober, generous and 
fond of children, " submissive but never obsequious, active but not 
laborious, superstitious but not religious, addicted to thieving 
without being a rogue, averse to matrimony yet devoted to 
several wives." His profound capacity for indolence he illustrates 
in the following manner : " A negro espies his fellow at the end 
of the street, and rather than join him in a tete-h-tete he will carry 
on a conversation with him for several hours at the top of his 
voice, to the unspeakable" annoyance, perhaps the scandal, of all 
those who may occupy the intermediate houses. Should the wind 
blow off his hat he will continue the conversation, and let someone 
else pick it up for him ; or if he condescends to notice the 
occurrence will walk leisurely after it until it meets with some 
natural obstruction." ^ 

* St. Lucia, by H. H. Breen, page 203: London, 1844 



CASTRIES AND ITS PEOPLE. 127 

It was into the harbour of Castries that there crept on May 8, 
1902, an unexpected and woeful-looking steamer. She came 
slowly, as if in pain, her screw labouring through the water with 
much moaning and creaking. She was grey and ghost-like. Every 
scrap of paint had been burnt from her sides, or was hanging from 
the bare iron like flaps of skin. Her ropes were charred; the 
planks of her charthouse were blackened. A fainting man at the 
wheel clung to the spokes to prevent himself from falling. His 
face was so blistered that his eyes were nearly shut ; his hair was 
singed close to his skull ; his hands were raw and bleeding ; his 
clothes scorched into something that was black and brittle. The 
decks of the ship were like a grey sand-dune, for upon them were 
many tons of still hot ashes. There were horrible shapes lying 
muffled in this dust — the bodies of dead men who were covered 
with cinders as with a shroud. This was the steamship Rod- 
dam, the only vessel that escaped from the fearful disaster which 
had overwhelmed the town and harbour of St. Pierre. 

Towards the south of the island is the curious little town of 
Soufriere, lying in the bend of a glorious bay whose blue depths 
are such that an anchor, to reach the bottom, would need from 
300 to 600 feet of cable. This haphazard village of wooden 
shanties is placed at the mouth of a green valley which is making 
its way seawards. The place has a look of unreality appropriate 
to some " pirates' lair " in a scene at a theatre. The stepping forth 
of a corps de ballet and a crowd of much rouged buccaneers would 
hardly excite surprise. 

On the occasion of the steamer's visit the motley inhabitants 
came down to the beach en masse, jostling and grinning, men, 
women and children, hazy dotards and naked infants. From 
under the trees, from out of quaint streets and lanes they poured 
to the water's edge, where they crowded about the primitive boats 
and the piles of gaudy fish on the beach. The children crawled and 
wriggled to the front as if the Pied Piper of Hamelin were calling 
them from the bay. Over the sea of heads, heads of woolly hair, 
heads covered with brilliant turbans, golf caps, sombreros, straw 
hats without brims and felt hats without crowns, it was possible to 
see into the town and to see that it was empty, save, perhaps, for 



J28 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

one single belated woman who, having picked up a forgotten baby, 
was rushing helter-skelter to the shore. 

The population of the settlement is given as 2300. Whatever 
it might be, I am convinced that we saw the entire number 
on the beach that day, excepting only the bedridden and the 
moribund. 

On the south of the cove are the two famous pyramidal or 
tooth-shaped rocks, the Pitons, which rise to the height re- 
spectively of 2460 and 2620 feet. They are sheer, isolated and 
terrible, with the aspect of Titanic mountain peaks which have 
been removed and cast into the sea. They are partly covered 
with trees which hold on to the rock face in some miraculous 
fashion. The appearance of this almost vertical forest provokes a 
sense of dizziness. The root of one tree may be on a level with 
the top of the one just below it, each clinging to a narrow ledge 
on a sheer wall. 

Some little way inland, behind the opera-bouffe town, are the 
sulphur springs of Soufriere. The same are thus described by 
Mr. Paton ^ : " We came to the verge of a yawning gulf, a mite or 
more in circumference, whose sides rose perpendicularly, in fact 
almost overhung the dismal abyss, at the bottom of which, two or 
three hundred feet below us, we could see many springs boiling 
amid rocks that looked like -the ruins of ancient lime kilns. 
Issuing from these pits were clouds of fetid steam, noisome ex- 
halations, causing destruction of vegetation near the pits and 
blackening the rocks on which they condensed. It was a most 
uncanny sort of place, desolate, infernal in aspect, and to the 
leeward of this Avernus the grass and blighted vegetation for a 
long distance all around were discoloured and stained, which gave 
them the appearance of lying continually under the shadow of 
a dense cloud." 

King Louis XVI. caused baths and appropriate buildings to be 
erected near these springs " for the use of his Majesty's troops in 
the Windward Islands." In the course of time a quite extensive 
spa was established about a mile from the town. Invalids came 

' Down the Islands, page 265 : London, 1888. 



CASTRIES AND ITS PEOPLE. 129 

hither from all parts, even from France, in spite of the dangerous 
and weary journey. They came to the spa because it was new, 
little known, and a long way off. As is the habit of the sick they 
were attracted by something pungent to smell and disgusting to 
drink, and by mysterious modes of bathing, associated with some 
suggestion of the rites of sorcery. They were attracted also by 
that pathetic belief in the miraculous and the supernatural which 
figures ever in the despairing creed of stricken men and women. 



I30 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEF, 



XXV. 

THE SONG OF CASIMIR DELAVIGNE. 

The history has yet to be written which will deal with the effects 
of the French Revolution upon the people in the French West 
Indies, and, at the same time, tell of the strange activities it 
aroused and of the bizarre ends to which it led. 

The greater number of the inhabitants of these islands were 
negroes who were living in a not-oppressive slavery. To them 
came, with much shouting and with an unfamiliar shaking of 
hands, the knowledge that they were " men and brothers." The 
information flattered their pride even though it was conveyed in 
terms of some ambiguity. The tricolour was planted on the 
island fort There was much strange speech in the streets and on 
the quays, yelled by loud-voiced men standing on sugar tubs. It 
was very pleasant : it was an inspiring change, and when in 1794 
slavery was abolished in the French West Indies there was a 
practical outcome for a deal of talk. 

There entered, at this time, into the negro's life an indefinite 
joy embodied in the term " the rights of man." The phrase was 
comforting, full of sweet promise and wild possibilities. It was 
not precisely construed, but there was in it some hint of eternal 
idleness, some forecast of that basking in the sun which, in the 
negro's creed, represents " the whole duty of man " as well as the 
eternal privilege of the angels. The " rights of man " included 
not only bawling in the streets and lounging on the quay side, but 
they embraced free access to rum, some acquiring of that property 
which was common to the Brotherhood, and the occasional 
diversion of seeing a planter's mill in flames. 



THE SONG OF CASIMIR DELAVIGNE. 131 

Amongst other effects of the Revolution was an abhorrence of 
the unenlightened English. That people did not embrace the 
negro with brotherly arms, nor did they profess any knowledge of 
the " rights of man." They so believed in " good, old-fashioned " 
slavery for the negro that when a French island was captured the 
coloured folk found themselves once again in bondage. Thus it 
came about that, at this period, the black man sided with the 
French whenever war was in progress. Abercromby in his attack 
upon the islands in 1796 found himself opposed, not only by his 
old friends the French, but also by their new friends the negroes. 
The English, when they had taken St. Lucia, learnt that their 
endeavours were by no means at an end as soon as they had 
conquered the Morne Fortune and had pulled down the French 
flag. 

There was peace on the hill but not in the woods. In the 
forests was a hidden army, silent, desperate and venomous. 
It was made up of runaway slaves, of negroes whom the Revolu- 
tion had set free, and of escaped or deserting French soldiers. 
These were the brigands or bushrangers who introduced the 
Reign of Terror into many a smiling island. So full of hate were 
they, so merciless, so driven to extremes, that they became more 
deadly than the yellow vipers that slunk around their bivouacs. 
The chronicles of that invisible army were rich in murders and 
ambuscades, in kidnapping, man-hunting and cattle-raiding. 
They avoided battle, being content to count as their victories the 
burning homestead, the planter stabbed in the back, the mutilated 
woman and the dismembered child. 

The leader of the brigands in St. Lucia was one Lacroix, 
who, in his communications to Sir John Moore, styled himself 
" Commandant de I'Arm^e Frangaise dans les bois." " The Army 
in the Wood ! " a battalion of half-naked negroes, armed with 
knives and bludgeons, of famished and unshaven white men with 
the rags of the uniforms of France hanging from their limbs, their 
muskets rusty, and their eyes aflame from the last orgy on rum. 
A company of these men, squatting in a clearing in the forest to 
discuss fresh schemes of murder, must have appeared — from their 



132 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

hungry looks and savage growls — no other than a gathering of 
wer-wolves. 

The Revolution of July 1830, modest as it was, led to results 
in the Far West which were wholly unexpected. It was by the 
uprising in July that the people in Paris deposed Charles X. and 
placed Louis-Philippe in his place upon the throne. It is not 
easy to see how a change in the reigning family, from the house 
of Bourbon to that of Orleans, could have concerned, or even 
interested, the negro labourers in a remote island like Martinique. 
What did, however, happen is very graphically told of by Breen 
in his " History of St. Lucia." 

In the autumn of 1830, a French ship arrived at St. Pierre in 
Martinique, laden with heroes fresh from the streets and slums of 
Paris. The friends of Louis-Philippe, finding their master firmly 
seated on the throne, thought well to get rid of some of their 
tools. The most dangerous of these tattered king-makers they 
shipped across the seas to people Campeachy and other wilds in 
the New World It was little matter where they went so long as 
it was far enough from Paris. The barque that carried this 
precious cargo had the appropriate name of the Glaneuse — the 
Gleaner. The harvest had been reaped, and it was well to clear 
the mowed field. 

With the pious intention of ijitroducing new blood among the 
inhabitants of Martinique the Glaneuse landed a number of these 
choice citoyens upon the quay of St. Pierre. They were the scum 
of Paris, such human froth as only the bubbling of a revolution 
can bring up from the depths — a crowd of reputed artisans, street 
loafers, decrotteurs, jail-birds, discharged soldiers, and those half- 
crazy folk who rush out of alleys to scream and wave banners 
whenever there is a rising of any kind in any city. 

These " heroes of July " found, when they landed, that they 
were shunned by the respectable French of St, Pierre. They 
therefore hobnobbed with the negroes. The blacks were delighted 
and indeed honoured. For days and days, says Breen, " negroes 
and ' heroes of July ' paraded the streets arm in arm, or caroused 
together in the beer-shops." 



THE SONG OF CASIMIR DELAVIGNE. 133 

The new-comers told their black brethren of the glories of 
street fighting, of barricades made out of overturned wagons and 
coaches, of the joy of kneeling on a soldier's chest while you 
jagged his face with a broken bottle, of eyes ripped out upon the 
cheek by well-aimed flints, of the looting of taverns, of petroleum 
poured into cellars and followed by a lighted match. To the 
listeners this was delicious converse. The negro is theatrical 
in matters of the emotions, he is illogical and impulsive, for there 
is still a good deal of the savage in his blood. 

The passengers from the Glaneuse had much to say that 
was inspiriting about the " rights of man." They brought with 
them also another phrase which more vividly impressed the heavy 
mind of the field labourer. They talked of " the will of the 
people." " Look," said the heroes of July, " what the people can 
do and have done ! They alone are the power in the State ! Is it 
all well with you, the people of Martinique ? " The plantation 
hand answered that it was not well. 

One thing more the men from Paris introduced to their negro 
friends. They brought with them Delavigne's song "La 
Parisienne." This had been the hymn of the Revolution. It had 
been yelled in defiant chorus by frantic mobs, had been sung 
solemnly at secret gatherings and often in a woman's sweet voice, 
had been hummed or whistled by a thousand stragglers through 
the panic-hushed streets of Paris. It was the war cry of the 
revolutionists, the chant that had led them to victory. Casimii 
Delavigne, the famous lyric poet, the author of "Les Vepres 
Siciliennes," had little thought to what ends his song would 
lead. 

Every negro in St. Pierre learnt the rhyme and sung it. It 
could be heard the day long, in the cabaret^ in the streets, among 
the brakes of sugar-cane, on the solitary road. 

Paris n'a plus qu'un cri de gloire : 

En avant marchons 

Contra leurs canons. 
A travers le feu des bataillons, 

Courons a la Victoire ! 



134 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

To suit local affairs and to indicate the objects of all hatred, the 
negro, in his singing, substituted for " leurs canons," " les colons." 

En avant marchons 
Contra les colons 

became the refrain whenever no planters were near to hear. 

Now began pleasant days for the coloured folk of St. Pierre. 
Under the guidance of their friends from the Emotional City they 
planned a revolution of their own. The rising was to be in 
February. They were then to enforce the will of the people and 
to make themselves immortal as the Heroes of Martinique. There 
were secret meetings at midnight on silent beaches and in glades 
of the forest, where the plotters talked in whispers and where oaths 
were sworn. There were all the delightful mysteries of passwords 
and signs, the covert understanding, the sense of power. Every- 
where and at all times could Casimir Delavigne's song be heard in 
the air. It was the rumbling of the volcano. 

The rising planned by the schemers broke out prematurely at 
St. Pierre on February 9, at seven in the evening. It began by the 
setting fire to eleven sugar plantations and to certain prominent 
houses outside the town. In a moment St. Pierre was in an 
uproar. The streets were alive with troops, both horse and foot, 
hurrying to the suburbs ; with them were the gendarmes and such 
white men as happened to be in the city at the time and could 
carry arms. Sailors who had been landed from the. various ships 
in the harbour came running up the narrow lanes at the double, 
cutlasses in hand. The alarm bell was ringing in the cathedral 
tower. Shops were shut and houses barricaded, while women 
rushed to and fro terrified by the cry " The negroes are coming ! ' 
Now and then a rider would gallop along the street with news of 
fresh horrors creeping upon the town. The glare of fire was 
in the sky while, far away above the hubbub and clatter, the 
refrain of Delavigne's song rose up from a thousand exulting 
throats. 

The would-be heroes of Martinique were soon overcome. By 
S A.M. next morning the great revolution was over. Five hundred 



TI^E SONG OF CASIMIR DELAVIGNE. 135 

arrests were made and out of the number taken twenty-two were 
condemned to death. The last phase of the sorry story is well 
described by Breen who was an eye-witness of it all. 

" On May 19, the day appointed for the execution, the town of 
St. Pierre presented one of the most melancholy and heartrending 
spectacles ever exhibited in any country. Twenty-two human 
beings, having each a rope round his neck, were marched forth 
from the prison, near the Batterie Decnotz, escorted by soldiers, 
priests and policemen to the Place Bertin, where a gibbet sixty 
feet long had been erected for their execution. Several were 
foaming at the mouth, and by their gestures, language and looks 
manifested the working of the evil passions within. But the 
greater number appeared resigned to their fate, and were atten- 
tively listening to the exhortation of the clergy. 

" The Place and every avenue leading to it were thronged with 
mounted gendarmes and troops of the line. On reaching the foot 
of the gallows the agitation of the wretched culprits assumed a 
frightful degree of intensity. The spell was now broken ; the 
veil of delusion torn from their eyes ; all their visions of glory had 
vanished ; all their dreams of power and preponderance had 
dissolved, and nothing remained but the startling, shadowless 
reality of an ignominious death. 

" The most remarkable actor in this tragic scene was a coloured 
man named Ch^ry, who had been the chief promoter of the 
insurrection. At the sight of the gibbet he gave himself up to 
the wildest despair, vomiting forth imprecations, both loud and 
deep, against the white inhabitants, and expressing his fervent 
hope ' that the island of Martinique might be swallowed up in 
the ocean before another generation should pass away.' He had 
just commenced * En avant marchons ' when the bourreau^ shaking 
him by the rope that dangled on his back, said, pointing to the 
gallows, ' Voil^ votre chemin ! ' Ch6ry grinned and gnashed his 
teeth ; then tossing off his shoes in the air (one of which struck a 
gendarme with great violence on the face) he ran up the ladder to 
the head of the gallows, and in a few seconds was seen hanging 
without a struggle or a sigh. 



136 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

" The others were then thrown off in succession, until the whole 
twenty-two were left hanging together at equal distances from 
each other. In an hour after the bodies were cut down, and a 
long and lowering day closed on this lugubrious spectacle, just as 
the twenty-two corpses, the destined food of sharks, were dropped 
into the sea at some distance from the beach." ^ 

Thus, with the setting of the sun, there came an end to the 
song of Casimir Delavigne. 

^ History of St, Lucia, page 17 ft 



XXVI. 

MARTINIQUE. 

Twenty miles north of St Lucia is the French island of 
Martinique. It can be seen from the heights above Castries 
whenever the sky is clear, a pillar of cloud resting on the sea, 
silver-grey at noon, lilac at sunset. 

Columbus landed here one day in June 1 502. It was a spot 
he was curious about, for he had heard of it on a previous voyage 
as the island of Matinino, where all the inhabitants were women. 
It was a strange legend, with some element of prophecy in it, for 
the Martinique of to-day is famous, above all, as the home of 
comely women. The men of the place are of no particular dis- 
tinction, certainly of no interest — mere West Indian negroes and 
mulattoes. The women, on the other hand, are, as an American 
writer expresses it, " a race apart." 

Like others of the volcanic isles Martinique is green and 
rugged — green with vast jungles, rugged with a thousand hills. 
" Although less than fifty miles in length and less than twenty in 
average breadth, there are upwards of four hundred mountains in 
the little island, or of what at least might be termed mountains 
elsewhere. These again are divided and interpeaked, and bear 
hillocks on their slopes." ^ 

This island of " indescribable glory " is so fascinating that to 
those who know it best it is Le Pays des Revenants — The 
Country of the Comers-back. Martinique was colonised by the 
French in 1635, and although it was for many years a shuttle- 
cock of war, and although the British seized it on four separate 

' Two Years in the French West Indies, by Lafcadio Hearn, page 256 : New 
York, 1890. 



138 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

occasions, and indeed held it once for a period of six years, it 
has remained French to the backbone — as French as the town of 
Blois. 

Fort de France, the capital, lies on a plain at the foot of low 
hills. From the bay there is little to be seen of it but a jumble 
of red roofs and palm trees, above which rises the spire of the 
cathedral. To the south of the town is an immense grey fort 
whose surly walls stand half in the water and half on land, an 
amphibious place already mouldy and rusty from neglect. This 
is the Fort St. Louis, which plays no small part in the annals of 
the British navy. On a height behind the town is a still larger 
and dingier fort, the Fort Bourbon. It sulks there, black and 
forbidding, coiled up like a colossal snake that had been driven 
out of the gay-coloured town. It was from the harbour of Fort 
de France (then Fort Royal Bay) that Count de Grasse sailed 
with his fleet to meet Rodney on the glorious 12th of April, 1782. 

Fort de France, a prosperous place of 17,000 inhabitants, will 
occasion some surprise to the visitor who is acquainted only with 
the British possessions in these seas. Landing from a rowing- 
boat at a small pier on the fringe of the city he will find himself 
suddenly, in spite of palms and sand-box trees, in France and in 
the streets of a French country town. The chief street. Rue Saint- 
Louis, is typical of the place. Here are brightly painted houses 
with green jalousies and iron balconies, houses let in flats where 
women chat for ever out of windows, familiar French shops, the 
" Bazar Parisien," the " grand caf6 " with its small tables, the 
restaurant with madame, fat and busy, sitting at a high desk. 
The very names of the streets are written in white letters on those 
plaques of blue enamelled iron which mark every Paris street 
corner. On any spare wall are the gaudy advertisements of the 
French provinces — the persistent apiritif, the marvellous hair wash 
the unanatomical gloves and shoes, the everlasting chocolat. 

Happy is he who reaches Fort de France for the first time or 
a Sunday. The streets are then thronged by a moving company 
as brilliant in colour as are the idlers at the foot of the Shwe 
Dagon Pagoda in Burmah. The crowd is composed mostly of 



MARTINIQUE. 139 

women. They present every tint of skin from white to ebony. 
Here are the heavy-featured but smiling negress, the girl with the 
" sapota " skin, the girl with cheeks of cinnamon or chocolate, the 
nut-brown maid, the matron with the skin of a fawn, the stately 
woman whose complexion has the sunny tint of an ear of ripe 
corn. The fairest of all is the fille de couleur, the darker are the 
quadroon and octoroon, the m^tisse, the chabine of Martinique. 
" A population fantastic, astonishing — a population of the Arabian 
Nights."-^ Some of these women are remarkably beautiful, tall, 
lissome, and statuesque, with rounded limbs, perfectly moulded 
necks and a fine carriage of the head. They walk erect with 
swaying hips, lithe and languorous, graciously, yet with just some 
suggestion of coquettishness. Here is a porteuse, a half-clad 
figure of bronze perfect in its modelling ; and here are two girls 
holding baskets on their heads who are veritable Caryatides. 
Many have sad, regretful-looking eyes, many a mien of gentle 
dignity, others a bearing that is quite imperious. 

There are few who are not bare-footed, and the rustle of their 
feet on the dry road is a sound the most enticing that human 
steps can make. It has its very opposite in the mechanical tramp 
of drilled men, and its complement in the clatter of Japanese clogs 
in a temple close. " Soundless as shadow," writes Hearn, " is the 
motion of all these naked-footed people. On any quiet mountain 
way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often 
be startled by something you feel, rather than hear, behind you, — 
surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb 
oscillations of raiment, — and ere you can turn to look, the 
haunter swiftly passes with Creole greeting of *bon-jou' or 
' bonsou6, missi6.' " 

Their costumes mimic the daring colours of the tropical bird. 
A few of the womenfolk wear a long, trailing dress, the douillette, 
made in one piece from neck to foot ; others a robe, over a white 
petticoat, a linen bodice and a foulard, or silk kerchief, across the 
shoulders. The head-dress is very picturesque. It consists 
of a " madras," an ample silk handkerchief wound about the head 

1 Two Years in the French West Indies, by Lafcadio Hearn : New York, 1890. 



140 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

turban-fashion, and finished off by a projecting end, which stands 
up like the eagle's feather in an Indian's hair. The colour of the 
madras will be usually a canary-yellow or yellow striped with 
black. The hues of the dresses are bewildering. Here are a skirt 
of roses and a foulard of sky-blue, a gown of scarlet and yellow 
with a terra-cotta scarf across the breast, a dress of white striped 
with orange below a foulard of green, a frock of primrose spotted 
with red and completed by a scarf of mazarine blue. Add to this 
the necklace of gold beads, the heavy bracelets, the great earrings, 
and the " trembling pins " that fix the madras ; and then realise, 
over all, the white light of a tropical noon. 

Most of the women have come from the fast-emptying cathe- 
dral, bringing with them the odour of incense. Among the crowd 
are a few Europeans dressed in the costumes of Paris, and looking 
stiff and out of place. In the street also are dapper French 
soldiers and officials in white uniforms, gnarled country women 
with broad-brimmed hats, and a number of bronze men with 
naked chests, most of whom are bareheaded or are decked with 
a hat ostentatiously shapeless. 

The crowd makes way for the nuns and their queue of school- 
girls, as they pass along the streets from the cathedral to the 
convent. The sombre robes of the nuns and their dead -white 
wimples contrast severely with the sensuous colours around them. 
The girls are all mulattoes, whose pretty brown faces are 
surmounted by turbans of royal purple. Their dresses are of one 
pattern, blue with white spots, very simple and demure. 

One thing assuredly the French have taught the golden brown 
maiden of Martinique, and that is, how to dress with justice to her 
good looks and credit to her stately figure. Very striking is the 
comparison between these statuesque women and the " coloured 
lady " of Barbados, who has learnt to make herself ridiculous by 
a travesty of the fashions of London. 

Even more bewildering in colour than the streets is the market- 
place, where are stalls covered with surprising fish, blue, green, 
scarlet, and gold, piles of brown fruits, heaps of yellow bananas, 
unfamiliar vegetables of unfamiliar shades of green, as well as 
a mound of silk scarves like a crumpled-up rainbow. 



MARTINIQUE. 141 

The cathedral is such an one as rises above the roofs of a 
hundred French towns. It is just as weather-worn without and 
as tawdry within, while from its steeple floats the same jangling 
chime of small-voiced bells. In an enclosure behind the church 
is the white figure of the Virgin from St. Pierre which miraculously 
escaped the cyclone of flame by which that town was overwhelmed. 

Just outside the city is an unkempt, uncared-for common, 
dignified by the name of La Place de la Savane. It is meant to 
be a park, but it is no more than a piece of open ground where 
the loafer can sleep and where the children have worn away the 
grass in untidy patches. It boasts a meagre band-stand, such as 
a provincial townlet might set up in a moment of ambition, and 
then forget and leave — as this is left — bare even of paint. 

In the centre of this Ishmaelitish waste, guarded by a clump 
of palms, is a very unexpected object — a white marble statue of a 
woman, an imperious woman, the Empress Josephine. She was 
born on the island at Trois Ilets, a village which lies hidden away 
in one of the many green creeks of Fort de France Bay. The 
charm of this tall, pale figure is irresistible. She is in the costume 
of the Empire, with bare neck and arms. On the cushion of her 
pretty hair rests a crown. Her left hand leans upon a medallion 
of Napoleon. She is raised aloft, against the blue sky, on a classic 
pedestal of white stone. The finding of this superb lady of courts 
and palaces, the chatelaine of Malmaison, on a poor patch of out- 
cast land by a West Indian town is beyond words surprising. 
Her face is plaintive and tender, gracious and infinitely womanly. 
" Over violet space of summer sea, through the vast splendour of 
azure light, she is looking back to the place of her birth, back 
to beautiful drowsy Trois Ilets, and always with the same half- 
dreaming, half-plaintive smile — unutterably touching." ^ 

Josephine was the eldest daughter of Joseph de La Pagerie, 
a lieutenant of artillery, who a few months after his marriage had 
helped to defend the island from an attack of the British in 1762. 
La Pagerie owned a plantation near the hamlet of Trois Ilets, and 
in the mansion upon the estate Josephine was born on June 2 2, 
1763. She was educated at a convent at Fort de France (then 

^Two Years in the French West Indies, by Lafcadio Hearn, page 66 : New York, 1890. 



142 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Fort Royal), leaving at the age of fifteen, by which time she had 
learnt little more from the " Dames de la Providence " than how 
to dance, to sing and to embroider. 

Of the house in which Josephine was born nothing now remains 
except a fragment of the kitchen, for the building was totally 
destroyed by the fearful hurricane of 1766. The hurricane brought 
ruin upon the family as well as upon the house. The mansion 
was never rebuilt, and the planter, his wife and children, took up 
their abode in the sucrerie. This structure is still in existence, 
a low, shed-like building of stone, with dormer windows in the 
roof and a tall chimney at one end of it Such is the only home 
that Josephine can have known at Trois Ilets. It is a remarkable 
contrast to the stately house at Malmaison with its many-mirrored 
salons, its exquisite gardens and pleasances. It was at Malmaison, 
it will be remembered, that the deserted Empress died. 

She left Martinique in 1779, at the age of sixteen, to marry a 
son of the Marquis de Beauharnais, the one-time governor of the 
island. She landed at Havre. After her separation from her 
husband Josephine returned to Trois Ilets. This was in 1788, when 
she was twenty- five. She stayed in the island two years, when 
she joined Beauharnais again and remained with him until his 
execution, at the time of the Terror, in 1794. After his death she 
was reduced to great straits for money, living with her two children 
in a very humble house in Paris. The story need not be retold of 
her meeting with Napoleon, or how it came about that she married 
him in 1799. He was then a man of thirty and she a woman 
of thirty-six. He writes to her as his "dear little wife," and is 
always wondering " what is the secret of her influence." 

She must have been a woman of remarkable fascination, 
clever and the mistress of consummate tact Conspicuous among 
her many fine traits are her tenderness and warm-hearted 
amiability. As Napoleon said, " She had no more sense of resent- 
ment than a pigeon." One most womanly quality — a love of 
pretty clothes — possessed her to the very end of her days, for 
Madame de Rdmusat has said that " she died covered with ribbons 
and pale rose satin." 



Dominica G ii a n n e I 



^ 



< 




■4, 



^QpvS O 



rn 



</> 



ro 



MARTINIQUE 

With the exception of MontPele 

the mountainous features of the 

island are not shown 

Eng-lish Miles 
o 2 4 6 8 ro 
1 1 1 1 I I 



H, 



t. Lucia 



6 fi a n n e / 



Pigeon 



i-sp f J St. Lucia 



Longitude West of Greenwich 6i 




XXVII. 

" NO FLINT " GREY AND THE STONE SHIP. 

As the steamer sails into Fort de France Bay there will be 
noticed, just off the southern point of the harbour, a minute island 
lying close to the shore. This is I let k Ramiers, or the Wood 
Pigeons' Island. It is very insignificant, being only about lOO feet 
high and 300 feet in circumference at the summit, yet it played a 
remarkable part in some of the hardest fighting that Fort de 
France ^ ever saw. 

It was in February 1794 that the trouble began, and, of course, 
the British were at the bottom of it General Grey had come, 
in fact, to Martinique to capture it, bringing with him nineteen 
ships and 7000 soldiers. Now the first thing that stood in his 
way was this very Wood Pigeons' Island. Its name is decep- 
tive ; for it was equipped by the French with no less than twenty- 
two heavy guns, its stores of ammunition were abundant, and, 
above all, it was furnished with the necessary appliances for heat- 
ing shot. So long as little Ramiers was capable of firing twenty- 
two cannon balls at a time, whether red-hot or not, it was im- 
possible for any ship to enter the harbour. Grey did not wish to 
leave his nineteen vessels out in the open, and as he could not 
creep in by the north shore on account of Fort St. Louis he deter- 
mined that the battery on Ilet k Ramiers must cease to be. 

He landed a force, far away on the south of the island, at 
three points, Marin, Trois Rivieres and Pointe Bourgos. He then 
marched to the headland overlooking Pigeon Island, fighting as he 
went. If it be remembered that Martinique was then little more 
than a heap of hills and pathless forest, this was no small achieve- 

» Then called Fort Royal. 



144 



THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



merit. He occupied a morne some 400 yards from the island. 
To the summit of this height he dragged his guns after two days 
of prodigious labour. He then had I let a Ramiers in the hollow 
of his hand. He bombarded it until he silenced it, whereupon the 
British fleet crept into the harbour by the southern shore, out of 
reach of the guns of St. Louis. (See Map.) 

So far this was well, but to gain possession of Martinique it 
was necessary that Grey should capture St. Pierre and take the 
P'orts Bourbon and St. Louis. To effect these ends another force 
was landed on the east coast at Gallon Bay. Here it broke up 
into two detachments. One party made for Morne Bruneau, a hill 
commanding Fort Bourbon ; the other started for St. Pierre. This 
march of the English upon St. Pierre was probably the most re- 
markable feat ever accomplished in any West Indian campaign. ' 
The troops went by the coast to the Capot River, then turning 
westwards they climbed up 4000 feet to the pass of La Calebasse, 
hard by the very crater of Mont Pel6. Thence they descended to -r 
St. Pierre and took that cheerful town without resistance. This 
famous march was astounding in many ways. It was made 
through an unknown country under a tropical sun. The invaders 
had to find their way across miles of jungle, had to clamber up 
precipitous hills and crawl down into black ravines. Every fort 
and redoubt they came upon they had to take, and did take. 

The method of their fighting was as astonishing as the 
obstinacy of their advance. They were armed, of course, with 
flint-lock muskets. Now General Grey had a prejudice against 
the firing of guns by soldiers. He considered the proceeding 
slow, wasteful and noisy, and, when employed to fight men who 
were ensconced behind earthworks or fort walls, a measure far from 
satisfactory. He believed in the bayonet, in the eighteen inches 
of cold steel. Shouting and volley firing were very effective on 
the parade ground, but for actual fighting his faith was in clenched 
teeth and a blade of good old Sheffield steel. Before commencing 
any march, therefore, the General's first care was to remove the 
flints from his men's muskets so that they advanced into a hostile 
country armed only with bayonets. When an outpost was reached 



"NO FLINT" GREY AND THE STONE SHIP. 145 

there were two courses open to Grey's soldier, either to stand still 
and be shot down or to rush the slope at the point of the bayonet 
and so get the business over. Thus it was that this redoubtable 
general received the nickname of " No flint " Grey. 

The French regarded " No flint " Grey and his men with 
unfeigned dislike. This new British mode of attacking a fortified 
place was nothing less than hideous. The Frenchman, peeping 
out from behind a gabion, was rather inspired by the sound of 
firearms. There was the noise of battle to cheer him as well as 
a cloud of smoke to hide much that he had no great desire to see. 
Moreover, to make an assault under musket fire effective, it must 
be carried out in the daylight. The attack at the point of the 
bayonet by " No flint " Grey was by choice undertaken at night. 

Such an assault was awful to contemplate. It meant invisible 
men creeping up to trenches in the dark and in silence. The 
defender of the redoubt would have a fearful sense of something 
advancing through the gloom, something gliding towards him like 
a black mist. He would wish to fire off his piece or to shout, 
merely to break the benumbing silence. Then would come the 
rustle of unseen bushes, the snapping of a twig, the crunch of a 
nailed boot on a stone, sounds a thousand times more terrifying 
than the rattle of a hundred muskets. He knew that the next 
moment would be heard the rushing of feet, and the pump-like 
sough of panting breath ; then a claw of a hand would grip the 
parapet of earth, gleaming eyes would rise out of the mirk, and 
finally a great and awful figure would spring up with a death-cold 
bayonet and a half-muttered English oath. It is little to be 
wondered if the Martinique soldier thought he could better face 
the devil than " No flint " Grey. 

In the memorable march to St. Pierre many entrenched 
positions were taken in this fashion. The very last redoubt to be 
stormed was rushed at two o'clock in the morning, at an hour 
when the courage of a man who watches is apt to be at its 
chilliest. It is needless to tell how Fort Bourbon and Fort St. 
Louis were taken, or how the island passed into the possession of 
the British. The account of this daring and splendid feat of arms 



146 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

has been vividly described by Fortescue in his " History of the 
British Army." ^ 

It is only necessary to devote one word to the fall of the great 
fortress of St. Louis. This fort, as has been already mentioned, 
juts out into the sea. The taking of it, therefore, was a matter 
for the fleet to handle. If the orthodox procedure had been 
followed, the men-of-war would have approached the works near 
enough to have bombarded them. During the manoeuvre they 
would themselves have formed easy targets for the gunners on the 
seaward bastion. The spirit of " No flint " Grey had, however, 
taken hold of the sailor-men. They recognised that the 
regulation method of dealing with the fort would be tedious and 
unexciting. 

So Captain Faulkner, with no more ado, put all sail upon his 
ship the Zebra, and making full tilt for the fort and its line of 
cannon, ran his vessel aground against the very walls of the 
battery. Boats and men were ready for the escalade, so whiJe the 
unhappy Zebra heeled over as if in a swoon, the captain and his 
crew tumbled over the side and in a few minutes they were 
swarming up the sea-wall of the fort, hanging on to any gaps 
between the stones, or to any tufts of weed, using their comrades' 
shoulders as a mounting step until they could climb in through 
the gun embrasures. They carried with them cutlasses and 
boarding pikes, but the Frenchmen, liking these weapons no 
better than the bayonet, threw down their arms and watched with 
mingled feelings the unfurling of the British flag above the fort. 

There is one other spot in Martinique which is so full of brave 
memories that it can never be passed by a Briton without a 
tribute of pride to the sailors of bygone days. Off the south-west 
corner of the island is an uninviting rock called in the charts 
Diamant Rock. It is bare and smooth like a bent knuckle. Its 
weather-stained sides are grey, shaded with pink. It is 
inaccessible except at a small spot on the west side. That any 
living thing but a seabird could reach its summit — which is 
574 feet above the water-level- — would seem improbable, 

» VoL iv. 



"NO FLINT" GREY AND THE STONE SHIP. 147 

Now in 1803, when Admiral Hood was doing battle with the 
French in these parts, he found that the enemy's ships were 
constantly escaping from him through the Fours channel which 
lies between this rock and Diamant Point. So he laid his 
seventy-four, the Centaur, alongside the pyramid of stone for the 
purpose of placing a battery on its summit. It seemed a mad 
scheme enough. But his men clambered somehow to the top of 
the rock, dragging ropes and tackles with them. These they 
dangled over the precipice down to the Centauf's deck. In the 
course of time a gun, swinging in the air like a dead minnow on 
a line, was being hauled up the sheer wall. Other cannon 
followed, by the same aerial route, until at last on the top there 
was a battery composed of three long twenty-fours and two 
eighteens. It would have been little surprise to the islanders if 
these men, who looked like ants on a boulder, had pulled up the 
Centaur herself after the guns. 

One hundred and twenty men and boys were landed, under 
the command of Lieutenant James Maurice, to garrison the fort. 
The boys, it may be imagined, had the best time of their lives. 
James Maurice made creditable use of his exalted position. He 
swept the sea with his cannon and did a woeful deal of damage, 
as the French were compelled to allow. His rock was entered in 
the Admiralty books as " H.M. Ship, Diamond Rock." For 
sixteen weeks he held the post to the joy of his comrades. The 
old admiral had a face as keen and fierce as an east wind, but 
whenever he looked towards the Fours channel a very generous 
smile must have swept over his tough features. 

At last his Majesty's ship " Diamond Rock " had to haul 
down her flag for the very good reason that the powder was 
exhausted and the water-tanks dry. Even when reduced to this 
discouraging plight the rock dwellers did not yield meekly, for 
at the very last it took two French seventy-fours, a frigate, a 
corvette, a schooner, and eleven gunboats to bring them to 
surrender. The commandant of the stone ship, when he handed 
his sword to the French captain, may well have apologised for all 
the trouble he had given. 



148 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



xxvni. 

THE CITY THAT WAS. 

St. Pierre, the debonair, the adored city of Martinique, was 
swept off the earth by the fearful eruption of Mont Pel6 in the 
month of May 1902. The chronicles of the town, as well as the 
many views of it which survive, make it evident that St. Pierre 
was one of the most delectable abodes of men in the West Indies. 
It stood in a blue bay, along a beach bent like a bow, with green 
hills behind it and the towering mass of the awful mountain on 
its northern side. 

There was one man at least for whom the ill-fated city had 
an irresistible fascination — Lafcadio Hearn — for he writes of it as 
one under a spell. To him it was ever " the quaint, whimsical, 
wonderfully coloured little town . . . the sweetest, queerest, 
darlingest little city in the Antilles."^ No description of the 
place can be more vivid, more affectionate than that given by his 
pen. This is his account of the Grande Rue, the Rue Victor 
Hugo, and of the town generally : 

" A bright, long, narrow street rising towards a far mass of 
glowing green. Not a street of this age, but of the seventeenth 
century ; a street of yellow facades, with yellow garden walls 
between the fagades. In sharp bursts of blue light the sea 
appears at intervals — blue light blazing up old, old flights of 
mossy steps descending to the bay. And through these openings 
ships are visible, far below, riding in azure. 

" Walls are lemon colour ; quaint balconies and lattices are 
green. Palm trees rise from courts and gardens into the warm 

' Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. i. pages 413 and 415 : London, 1906. 



THE CITY THAT WAS. 149 

blue sky, indescribably blue, that appears almost to touch the 
feathery heads of them. And all things within or without the 
yellow vista are steeped in a sunshine electrically white, in a 
radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavements of basalt 
the glitter of silver ore." ^ 

" Everywhere rushes mountain water — cool and crystal-clear, 
washing the streets ; — from time to time you come to some public 
fountain flinging a silvery column to the sun, or showering bright 
spray over a group of black bronze tritons or bronze swans. The 
Tritons on the Place Bertin you will not readily forget; their 
curving torsos might have been modelled from the forms of those 
ebon men who toil there tirelessly all day in the great heat, 
rolling hogsheads of sugar or casks of rum. And often you will 
note, in the course of a walk, little drinking-fountains contrived 
in the angle of a building, or in the thick walls bordering the 
bulwarks or enclosing public squares ; glittering threads of water 
spurting through lion-lips of stone. 

" Seen from the bay the little red-white-and-yellow city forms 
but one multi-coloured streak against the burning green of the lofty 
island. There is no naked soil, no bare rock ; the chains of the 
mountains, rising by successive ridges towards the interior, are 
still covered with forests." ^ 

The town — as may be gathered — was built on rising tiers, 
mounting up the hillside. The higher quarters were reached by 
steep flights of steps, such as one sees in many an old Italian sea- 
town. These stone stairs did not lack for pretty names. One 
still to be found among the ruins was known as La Rue Monte- 
au-Ciel. The streets were narrow because shade is comfortable. 
They were well paved and trim. Besides the substantial and 
imposing cathedral there were other churches in the town, a 
bishop's palace, a convent, great military barracks, fine public 
buildings, and certain ancient forts. On the banks of the Roxe- 
lane river, with its many bridges, and in the suburbs beyond were 
bright painted villas and dainty gardens. 

• Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, vol. i. page lOO. 

* Two Years in the French West Indies, pages 37 and 52 : New York, 189a 



ISO THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The town had been famous for its Jardin des Plantes ; it 
supported a large theatre and other places of amusement. Its 
chief joy, however, was the Place Bertin — an open promenade by 
the sea — where were the fountains Hearn describes, and where the 
gandins loved to disport themselves on high days and holidays. 
There was also the mouillage — the landing-place — where, from 
under the shade of trees, the idler could watch the rolling to and 
fro of casks, the hauling of ropes, and the unloading of ships. 
The city was prosperous and well esteemed, bustling with life, 
rippling with gaiety. It may be that it was a little prone to 
pleasure, and that it did not strive tediously after a high reputation 
for morality. If this be true, the same has been said of the gay 
and careless town of Pompeii. 

The population numbered about 20,000, and the women of 
St. Pierre, while they were of the same engaging types as their 
sisters of Fort de France, are reputed to have excelled even them 
in handsome looks. 

It was on May 8 that the town was destroyed. For many 
days before that date the great mountain had been showing signs 
of angry uneasiness. Strange clouds of cauliflower shape rose out 
of the crater. Terrible cannonadings were to be heard, while 
upon the city there drifted, from time to time, a haze of fine ash 
borne along by a hot and suffocating wind. On May 5 an 
avalanche of boiling mud, many acres wide, tumbled down from 
the volcano, and went roaring along the bed .of the Riviere 
Blanche at the rate of a mile a minute. A large sugar factory 
was engulphed and some 150 lives lost. The torrent poured into 
the sea, throwing up fountains of steam, as if a lake of molten iron 
had been emptied into the deep. / 

The final cataclysm that struck the city with utter desolation 
took place at 7.52 on the morning of Thursday, May 8. It was 
witnessed by a cable-ship lying some miles out at sea, and by 
people who lived upon such neighbouring hills as were beyond the 
range of the destroying force.^ 

* An excellent account of the catastrophe will be found in Mont Peli and the Tragedy 
of Martinique, by Angelo Heilprin : Philadelphia, 1903. 



THE CITY THAT WAS. 151 

Suddenly, without warning of any kind, the summit of the 
mountain seemed to open, and from the lurid rent there burst 
a violet-grey cloud, the forepart of which was luminous and 
brilliant. It was shot from the torn crater as a charge from 
a cannon. It struck the town with terrific force, and then spread 
out over the sea and the hills. Loud detonations were heard. 
The flames in the cloud, as it swept along, were whirled into 
eddies and twisted into spirals. 

In a moment the whole of St. Pierre was ablaze from a 
thousand points. In another moment everything — the city, the 
near hills, the bay — was blotted out by an impenetrable black 
cloud of smoke and ash, which veiled the sun and hid the awful 
deed under the darkness of night. 

Thus in a few seconds was a town swept off the face of the 
earth, and 30,000 people left charred and dead. 

The force of the destructive blast must have been prodigious. 
Whole streets of houses were mown down by the flaming scythe. 
Walls three to four feet in thickness were blown away by the 
furnace blast like things of lath, while massive machinery was 
crumpled up as if it had been gripped and crushed by a titanic 
hand. The town was raked by a veritable tornado of fire, by 
a hurricane of incandescent dust and of super-heated vapour. It 
came down upon the ships in the harbour like a breaking wave, 
striking the Roddam broadside with such violence as to nearly 
capsize her. The bodies of all those who were found among the ruins 
were bare of clothing, the garments having been simultaneously 
charred and blown away by the withering wind. 

The area of total destruction of life was about eight square 
miles, but outside this was an extensive district known as the 
"singed zone." Out of the eighteen ships in the harbour one 
alone escaped — the Roddam (page 127). She had only come in 
at 7 A.M. on that very morning, and had fortunately been ordered 
to the quarantine station some distance off! 

The only human being spared the universal holocaust was 
a prisoner in the dungeon of the city jail, a negro named Augusta 
Ciparis. The dungeon — still to be seen — is on that side of the 



1^2 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEl*. 

prison which is away from La Pelee. It was sheltered by a high 
wall and had itself a domed roof of stone and plaster. There was a 
heavy door to the small building but no window. An iron grating, 
some two feet above the door, alone admitted light and air to the 
cell. The account that Ciparis gave of his unparalleled experiences 
is told by Heilprin in the following words : ^ 

" He was waiting for his usual breakfast on the 8th, when it 
suddenly grew dark, and immediately afterwards hot air, laden 
with ash, entered his room through the door-grating. It came 
gently but fiercely. His flesh was instantly burned, and he jumped 
about in agony, vainly calling for help. The heat that scorched 
him was intense, but lasted for an instant only, and during that 
time he almost ceased to breathe. There was no accompanying 
smoke, no noise of any kind, and no odour to suggest a burning 
gas. Ciparis was clad at the time in hat, shirt and trousers, but 
his clothing did not take fire ; yet beneath his shirt the back was 
terribly burned. . . . For three days and more he was without 
food of any kind, and his only sustaining nourishment was the 
water of his cell." It was not until Sunday, the nth, that he was 
liberated, his cries for help having been heard by two negroes who 
were hunting about among the ruins. 

The state of the city immediately after the catastrophe can be 
well conceived from the numerous photographs taken at the time, 
and from the descriptions of those who were the first to enter the 
mangled streets. In the place of the busy, pleasure-loving town 
was a silent desert of stones and dust. Tier above tier the ruins 
mounted up to the scorched hills. The land around had been 
swept bare of everything that was green, for the whole mountain 
side — once as bright as a robe of many colours — had been shrivelled 
to one desolate tint of cinder-grey. The streets were blocked up 
with stones and stucco, burnt timbers, scattered tiles, fragments of 
iron railings, tree trunks turned to coal, and dead charred bodies 
lying, for the most part, face downwards. Over all was a soft veil 
of volcanic dust 

The cobble-stoned quay had been swept clean by the tide. 

• Heilprin, loc. cit. page 117. 



THE CITY THAT WAS. 153 

Those who first landed there found only a bare skull and a bundle 
of white ribs lying by the side of a ship's steel hawser in its ring. 
One writer, who came to St Pierre towards the end of May, 
expresses the state of ruin by saying, " We seemed to be wandering 
through a city that had been blown from the mouth of a cannon, 
and not one that had been destroyed by any force of nature." ^ 
All this desolation, be it remembered, was the work of a few 
minutes. 

Many buildings left erect after the visitation of May 8 were 
demolished by a second eruption of Mont Tel6, which took place 
on May 20 at 5.15 A.M. This second outbreak was even more 
violent than the first. It happily involved no loss of life, but it 
completed the wreck of the city, leaving it as it is found to this 
day. 

' Heilprin, page 25. 



154 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XXIX. 

THE LAST NIGHT IN ST. PIERRE. 

When visiting St. Pierre I found among the ruins of a small 
house on the seaward side of Rue Victor Hugo a very homely- 
object, buried under much dust and miscellaneous debris — a bed- 
room candlestick. It was of enamelled iron, white, and lacking 
in all pretension. 

One may imagine (and there is none living to gainsay the 
conceit) that it belonged to some fille de couleur, some 'ti Marie 
whose madras and shoulder scarf once helped to make bright the 
streets of St. Pierre. It may be supposed that the candle was 
lit early on the night of May 7, for it would be dark by seven, 
and the electric light upon which the town depended had failed. 

Marie — it would be safe to guess — has lost her buoyant gaiety. 
There is something solemn and portentous in the air. She opens 
the casement and looks out into the street. All the laughter and 
sparkle seem to have left the debonair city. It is strangely silent. 
To-morrow is a holiday, the f^te of the Ascension, and the Grande 
Rue should be thronged at this time of the evening. The whole 
roadway is covered deep in dust. A light streaming from an 
open doorway shows that it has the colour of ashes. The carriages 
that pass by move without noise. The sound of the horses' feet 
is as if they trod upon turf. An old country waggon crawls 
along with a cheerful creaking of its unsteady wheels, a noise that 
breaks pleasantly upon the silence. Many of the chief shops have 
for days been closed to customers, as is announced in Les Colonies^ 
the daily paper of St. Pierre. There are lights in the cabarets, but 
the men who sit there are very quiet, the sound of their feet on 



THE LAST NIGHT IN ST. PIERRE. 155 

the ash-covered floor is harsh, and the rings of beer left by their 
mugs on the white tables are turned into rings of mud. 

Suddenly there comes a hideous rumbling sound that makes 
a score of people rush out into the road. The plates in the kitchen 
rattle, and as 'ti Marie looks back into her room she sees that the 
china image of the Virgin is rocking on its shelf. A puff of hot 
suffocating wind blows down the narrow way. It brings with 
it a smell of sulphur so pungent that the girl holds her handker- 
chief to her mouth. It sweeps the ashes from the roofs and 
awnings in gusts, so that men passing by turn up coat collars^ 
while women draw their scarves over their heads. 

Ashes still are falling ; some are large enough to make a patter 
on the balcony roofs. The dust covers everything, the girl's arms 
and hair, her neck, the sill upon which she leans. The candle, 
powdered with fine ash, splutters and burns feebly. One thing 
that makes the watcher at the window uneasy is the spectacle of 
people moving out of the town, on their way to the Fort de France 
road. They carry with them boxes and bundles. The quiet light 
in 'ti Marie's room seems to chide them for leaving their homes, 
and those who know her look lip at the window and bid her " bon 
soir " — a last good night. 

The night of May 7 was suffocating and intensely hot. This 
we know from the diary of a M. Roux who left St. Pierre 
at 5 P.M. on the 7th and spent the night on a distant hill, from 
which point he witnessed next morning the destruction of the 
city. 

It may be imagined that Marie slept little and that the candle 
was kept burning all night. Early in the evening she would have 
heard a steamer leaving the harbour, would have noticed the 
sound of the bell on the bridge, the shouts of the men and the 
rattle of the anchor chain coming in through the hawse pipe. 
This was the Italian ship Orsolina. The captain knew Naples, 
" knew what Vesuvius was, but felt that La Pelee was much that 
Vesuvius was not." ^ So, although he had only half his cargo on 
board and although the agents swore, protested, stamped and 

* Heilprin. 



156 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

threatened, he hauled up his anchor and, with a sigh of rehef, 
sought his way into the open sea. 

At daybreak next morning any who were awake would have 
heard a steamer come in, whistle cheerfully and drop her anchor, 
with the noisy satisfaction of having reached her port with " all well." 
This was a steamer of the Quebec line, the Roraima. In less than 
two hours she was charred and gutted and burnt to the water's 
edge. 

Possibly during this fevered, stifling night 'ti Marie may 
have consoled herself by reading the local newspaper published 
that morning.^ It contained much information about volcanoes 
that the reader may have skipped, but she would have gained 
great comfort and assurance from this editorial utterance : " La 
Montagne Pelee n'offre pas plus de danger pour les habitants de 
St.-Pierre que le V6suve pour ceux de Naples." The editor, 
moreover, in discussing the exodus from the city, remarks with 
some disdain : " Nous avouons ne rien comprendre a cette panique. 
Ou peut-on etre mieux qu'a St.-Pierre ? " Where could one be 
better than at St. Pierre ! 

Possibly 'ti Marie fell asleep towards the morning, after the 
candle had long burned down. She would be awakened at eight 
by a sound as of the bursting of a mine. The outer sun-shutter 
that closed the window would, untouched, release itself from its 
fastenings and swing open. A savage blast of flame would dart 
in, and in a second the soft, palpitating body of the little maid 
would be a curled up thing of damp ash. 

One other relic of the last days of St. Pierre in my possession 
is a silver watch. I obtained it from a man at Fort de France 
who, when visiting the ruins, had found it under the corpse of a 
man in one of the side streets. The outer case of the watch has 
been turned to a leaden black colour. The silver has been so 
melted by the heat that the pattern engraved upon the back is 
smeared out as if with a red-hot thumb. The glass is, of course, 
cracked and is partly fused to tiie white enamel of the face, yet it 
is still possible to read the time — 8.22. 

* A reproduction of Les Colonies for May 7 is given in Heilprin's book, page 68. 



THE LAST NIGHT IN ST. PIERRE. 157 

The exact moment of the destruction of the city was 7.52 a.m., 
as shown by the clock left standing over the military hospital. 
The awful suddenness with which the blow fell can best be judged 
from the following incident. At a moment corresponding to the 
above time a message came over the wire from St. Pierre to Fort 
de France. It consisted of one single word " Allez " — a remarkable 
utterance in view of what happened. It was the last word ever 
spoken by the city. It is said to have embodied the request that 
a message then in transit to St Pierre should be completed. 
Almost by the time that the clipped sentence reached Fort de 
France the office, the instrument, the operator, the very wires were 
a mass of cinders. 

The owner of the watch may have been preparing to start for 
the cathedral, dressed in his best, when the heavens were rent by 
the crack of doom. Rushing into the street, he would have been 
met by a scud of furnace-hot dust, by a red blizzard of glowing 
ash. He would be struck down by the sulphurous hurricane, and 
hurled along the road together with fragments of falling houses, 
flying tiles and stones, window shutters and balcony railings. His 
clothes would be stripped from his back as if they were made of 
dust, and he would lie among the cinders bare, a charred image 
of a man. 

If the watch were sentient it would have felt the death- 
discerning flutter of the heart and then the stopping of its beat. 
Protected by the smouldering body, the watch must have ticked 
against the now impassive ribs for some thirty minutes, until the 
heat had reached its own heart and stopped that too. 



IS8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



XXX. 

THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN. 

It was in February 1907 — ^just four years and nine months after 
the great disaster — that I visited St. Pierre. 

We steamed into the roadstead from Fort de France, and 
anchored as near the shore as the sunken shipping would allow. 
On entering the wide bay on which the city stood, the only 
impression is one of utter desolation. Dominating the whole 
district is the awful mountain La Pelde. It is well named " The 
Bald," for, with the exception of the verdure on its southern side, 
it is, as seen from the sea, nothing more than a gigantic cinder 
heap. The height of Mont Pel6 is 4428 feet.-^ It is a volcano of 
immense girth, since it occupies practically the northern end of 
the island. Enormous tentacles, in the form of harsh ridges, reach 
down to the Atlantic on the one side, and to the Caribbean Sea 
on the other. 

St. Pierre is at the very foot of the volcano, lying nearer to it 
by a mile than Pompeii did to Vesuvius. The rim of the crater 
is hidden in a cloud of smoke and mist. The slopes of the 
mountain are a ghastly fawn colour, streaked with grey and 
sinister tints of brown. They are slopes of mud relieved only 
by drifts of ash and hurled out rocks. When the sun is setting, 
the long shadows cast by the lower peaks across the cinder 
wastes are like the shadows that fall from the craters in the moon. 
Here and there are valleys of lilac or indigo blue, but their walls 
are burnt and bare so that they are mere echoing chines, terrible 
in their emptiness and loneliness. Torrents of rain have gouged 
gutters down the glissade of mud, while, at certain points, crests of 

* The height of Vesuvius is 3948 iieet, of Etna 9652 feet. 



THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN. 159 

rock and rib-like buttresses stand out, as if the skeleton of the 
mountain were protruding through its shrunken flanks. 

On the quarter nearest to the sea and to the town is an 
immense mud torrent, which has been suddenly struck motionless 
and solid. On the steeper heights it takes the form of a glacier of 
mud, carrying along a doleful moraine of impacted stones. Below 
it opens out like a fan into a full flood, contorted by intertwining 
streams, with here a motionless eddy, and there a whirlpool 
changed into a cone-shaped pit. In the impassive depths of this 
Slough of Despond lie the bones of one hundred and fifty men 
and women. One who saw the hideous mountain just after the 
cataclysm of May describes it well when he writes, " Mont Pel6 is 
bleeding with black mud." ^ 

Along the whole stretch of the bay there is not a living figure 
to be seen, not one sign of human life, not even a poor hut, nor 
grazing cattle. Over the site of the town, as seen from afar, there 
appears to lie a shadow that no sun can disperse — the shadow of 
the mountain. Along the beach, where the town stood, there is 
merely a stain in the green, a coarse smudge left by the hand that 
swept the city out of existence. 

The quay of cobble stones upon which one lands would seem 
to be but little altered, save for the heaps of cinder dust and the 
growth of weeds. There are still the bollards and iron rings for 
mooring ships as well as the little landing-places. Along the 
whole sea front is a line of pale ruins, roofless houses of stone with 
empty doors and windows, and a look of age so extreme that they 
may have been desolate a century or more. 

A generous growth of jungle has spread over the place in these 
last five years. Rank bushes and even small trees make quite 
a thicket along some of the less-traversed ways. A considerable 
part of the Rue Victor Hugo has been cleared of debris, leaving 
the trim road, the side paths and the rain gulleys precisely as they 
were on the morning of May 8. The houses are mere shells filled 
with tumbled stones, charred timbers, and dust. Looked down 
upon from a height the main street appears to run between two 

• ^eiIpri^, 



i6o THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

rows of stone sheep pens. Over some of the houses luxuriant 
creepers have spread, while long grass, ferns and forest flowers 
have filled up many a court and modest lane. It is easy to see 
that in a few more years the poor dead town, with all its hideous 
scars and horrors of deformity, will be hidden beneath a kindly 
covering of leaves. 

The walls of the cathedral are standing, and suffice to show 
that it was a building of some stateliness. The wide nave is 
blocked with a heap of masonry and a clump of bushes. The 
stone stairs that led up to the higher levels of the town now lead 
to nothingness. The forlomness of the place is beyond descrip- 
tion. Here the railings of a balcony will still be hanging to 
a wall, although the windows that opened on to it are gone. Here 
are the long iron hinges of a door still in place, with the lock 
holding to its socket as it did when the key was last turned by 
a living hand, but all the woodwork has crumbled into dust. 

The idlest grubbing among the ruins reveals many relics of the 
life of the place. Thus I came across numerous bones, bleached 
as white as the bones in a museum. In the centre of one house 
was an iron bedstead with the metal springs of its mattress. In 
another place there had evidently been an ironmonger's shop, for 
a disturbance of the dust brought to light a number of fish-hooks, 
a flat-iron, some padlocks, and many metal spoons. In one spot 
there would have been a draper's store, because under the stones 
I came upon an orderly bundle of black neck-ties, such as the 
provincial Frenchman loves to wear in a flowing bow on Sundays. 
They were intact, and seem to have suffered only from the 
damp. The curious manner in which some fragile things escape 
destruction has been noticed by all who have visited the ruins. 
Heilprin found packets of starch quite uninjured, as well as 
bundles of clay pipes and corked bottles with their contents 
unimpaired. Most of the glass found has been fused into strange 
shapes. I have a small drinking tumbler, the foot of which is 
unaltered, but the rim has been melted as if the cup were of wax. 

Two things above all will impress any one who likes to recall 
the city as it was — the lack of all colour, the absence of all sound. 



THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN. i6r 

It was on a Sunday evening, at the time of the setting of the 
sun, that our ship steamed away from this Bay of Desolation. 
Five years ago it would have been the gayest hour of the day. 
Under the shadow of the tamarind trees along the Place Bert in 
would be moving dots of scarlet and white, of primrose and blue, 
the dresses of smiling women who had come to the water's edge 
to see the steamer go away. The vesper bell would be ringing 
from the cathedral tower, while from the paths that zigzagged 
down the hill may have been borne the far-off laughter of folk 
returning to their homes. In its place was this silent Massacre 
Ghat, this city of ghosts, this heap of calcined bones. 

The town faces westwards, so as we steamed away the level 
rays of the sinking sun fell upon the poor dead walls, poured 
through the sightless windows, and threw long shadows of fantastic 
shape across the dumb white street. Just for a moment before 
the sun vanished a roseate hue spread over the gaunt city. Those 
who viewed it shuddered as would they who saw a flush of life 
creeping over a skull. It seemed as if — ere the night fell — the 
warm tint of life had come back to the life- loving town, and as if, 
across its withered face, there passed for a moment the happy 
blush of things remembered. 



M 



i62 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XXXI. 

DOMINICA. 

The next stage of the journey is to Dominica, some thirty 
miles to the north. The steamer passes by the foot of Mont Pel6 
close to the broken-off cliffs of mud piled up by the last eruption. 
Further on is the ancient village of Au Pr^cheur, upon whose 
small life has fallen the silence of the mountain's shadow. The 
little place has been buried in a torrent of volcanic mud, so that 
only the tower of the stone church stands up above the drift 

Beyond Au Pr^cheur, at a place called Aux Abymes, the cliffs 
become very lofty, sheer and black. They rise straight from the 
depths, for close to them will be found some thirty fathoms of 
water. It was under the shadow of these cliffs that the Con- 
federate cruiser Alabama hid herself " as a fish hides in the shadow 
of a rock," and so escaped from her pursuer the Iroquois. 

The Alabama had long been blockaded in the harbour of St. 
Pierre by the Northern man-of-war. The Iroquois could see her, 
but was unable to touch her so long as she remained in French 
waters. The Alabama resolved at last to make a run for it. One 
dark night, with all her lights masked, she crept out of St. Pierre 
and steered for the south. Unfortunately there were other Yankee 
ships in the harbour, and one of these shot a rocket southwards as 
a signal to the Iroquois that their quarry had escaped and had 
gone in that direction. The Iroquois gave chase. The Alabama 
kept close to the shore as far as Carbet, a thing invisible. Here 
she doubled like a hare, and making north, passed by St. Pierre 
again. The Yankee ship in the harbour — with what sporting 
men would consider the basest meanness — fired a rocket, this time 
northwards. The Iroquois turned and followed with all speed. 



DOMINICA. 163 

The htinted ship now crawled in close to the dark cliffs at Aux 
Abymes, and here she crouched in a disquieted suspense. The 
men crept about the deck on tiptoe and talked only in whispers. 
There was no sound but the splash of the sea against the cliff wall 
and the thud of the pursuing man-of-war. The Iroquois drew 
nearer and nearer. The men on the Alabama^ motionless as 
statues and almost fearing to breathe, watched her with the 
interest of despair. She came abreast of them. " Was she 
slackening speed ? " " No." She blundered by, tearing away 
fiercely to the north. The Alabama waited until she was out of 
hearing and then escaped by the Dominica Channel, her crew 
chuckling with laughter. 

If Francis Drake had been on board the Alabama he would 
have looked in at St. Pierre before he left and sunk the mean ship 
with the rockets. 

They say, they who know the islands, that Dominica is the 
most beautiful of all the Lesser Antilles, and in that they say well. 
As seen in the early morning it may be described in words that 
Lafcadio Hearn applies to another island : " A beautiful, fantastic 
shape floats to us through the morning light ; first cloudy gold 
like the horizon, then pearly gray, then varying blue, with growing 
green lights ; Dominica." * 

Like the neighbouring Antilles it is very mountainous, pre- 
senting on every side to the sea a front bold and magnificent. 
Its loftiest peak, the Morne Diablotin, reaches to the height of 
nearly 5000 feet. Its valleys are valleys of enchantment, made 
musical by the sound of a hundred streams. A vast forest covers 
it from crown to foot, for it is green to the very water's edge, 
while its topmost trees mount up into the clouds. 

It is a worshipful place ; " a tabernacle for the sun " ; a shrine 
of a thousand spires, rising tier above tier, in one exquisite fabric 
of green, purple and grey. The sea that lies at its feet is blue 
beyond comparison, a deep gentian blue. The same tint colours 
the haze that fills the inland gorges, as if the mist were but the 
blue sea vapourised. 

' Two Years in the French West Indies, page 92, 



i64 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Columbus made Dominica his landfall in the second voyage. 
Leaving Cadiz on September 25, 1493, and touching only at the 
Canaries on the way, he reached Dominica on November 3 of that 
year. His men were becoming alarmed at being so long out of 
sight of land, so, on November 2, Columbus recklessly assured 
them that they would see land on the morrow, and as night fell 
ordered sail to be shortened. When the next morning dawned 
they were off the most beautiful island they had ever seen. It 
was Sunday, and so the spot came to be named Dominica. 

Columbus did not land, but having cruised round the coast, 
proceeded to an island lying north-east. Here he anchored and, 
going ashore with much solemnity, took possession of such lands 
as were in view. The island thus honoured was uninhabited. He 
named it Marie Galante, after the ship in which he was sailing, 
and such is its name to this day. 

Dominica, beautiful as it is, did not attract the early emigrant. 
It was, as a matter of fact, held by Caribs of exceptional fierceness, 
who would have no dealings with visitors except to eat them. 
Davies, writing in 1666, has no more to say of Dominica but that 
it was a wilderness " inhabited by hordes of hostile savages, who 
dwell among horrid and unnatural scenery, infested by an infinite 
number of reptiles of a dreadful bulk and length." 

The Caribs had a particular objection to armed men. When 
that jovial priest and hon vtvant, Pere Labat, visited the island at 
the close of the seventeenth century he found the natives quite 
agreeable and placid. He tried to make Christians of them, and 
found that " they were willing to be baptised as often as he liked 
for a glass of brandy." ^ 

Every attempt, however, to make a regular settlement in the 
island failed ; so in 1748, as the place was of no use to either 
England or France, it was, with noble self-denial on both sides, 
declared to be neutral and handed over to its rightful owners, the 
Caribs. The wild man of Dominica had up to this time defied 
the European with success for just 255 years. A little later the 
French, with much patience and courage, colonised the uneasy 
' Froude, The English in the West Indies. 



DOMINICA. 165 

country ; whereupon, of course, the British wanted it and seized it. 
The French retook it, and in this way Dominica became another 
pawn on the great West Indian chess-board. 

Dominica was a favourite place of call for the distressed sea 
rover of early days. Both Hawkins and Drake found the island 
a convenient spot for "refreshing." Here also rested in IS97 
George, Earl of Cumberland, M.A. of Cambridge and pirate. He 
was on his way to San Juan, where he accomplished great deeds. 

Roseau, the chief town of Dominica, is a makeshift and untidy 
place, full, however, of ancient and most picturesque wooden 
houses, with shingle roofs, quaint porches and haphazard balconies. 
It shows the signs of progress and prosperity, for Dominica does 
a busy trade in both limes and cacao. Owing in great measure to 
the skilful administration of Dr. H. A. Nicholls, C.M.G., who has 
devoted his life to the island, the colony is very healthy, having 
the remarkably low death rate of sixteen per thousand. There has 
been no case of yellow fever in Dominica for over seventy years, 
and malaria is being slowly eliminated. The mean temperature 
for the year is 79"9°, while the annual rainfall at Roseau is about 
75 inches. 

There are two admirable features in the town which the visitor 
will at once appreciate : an excellent Free Library, with a good 
collection of books on the West Indies ; and the Botanic Gardens, 
which — thanks to the genius of Mr. Jones, the curator — are with- 
out a rival in this part of the world. Not only is the collection of 
tropical plants remarkable but every exhibit is clearly labelled, 
so that what is seen can be " understanded of the people." The 
Imperial Department of Agriculture has here a school for the sons 
of peasant proprietors and others, where instruction is given in the 
principles and practice of the craft. 

Roseau possesses a Roman Catholic cathedral of some pre- 
tension, but very French, and an English church of less ambition, 
but very English. There are many memorials on the walls of the 
latter, most of them so diffuse and eulogistic as to recall the fact 
that a statement cut upon stone is not an affidavit on oath. A 
truculent-looking fort, black with age, stands close to the water's 



i66 . THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

edge, a relic of the time when the British and French played 
at Dominica a game very like that known to boys as " King of 
the Castle." 

The inhabitants — negroes and mulattoes — make the dull 
streets, the duller quayside and the market-place bright by their 
gaudy costumes, and by the brilliant turbans and scarves with 
which the women deck their heads. 

Behind the town is a steep green hill, the Morne Bruce, with 
still upon its summit the signs of a long military occupation. From 
the far margin of the hill is a view of the Roseau valley as it winds 
inland. There are few who will not allow that this is the most 
enchanting prospect in the whole of the West Indian islands, and 
that the vale of the Roseau River is one of the most beautiful in 
the tropics. The valley is narrow and its walls are steep, walls 
of grey cliff and tree-covered slope. Over the cliffs have 
fallen a cascade of green, festoons of creepers, swinging ropes. 
At the foot of the rock lie piled-up masses of jungle, slopes of 
leaves, ledges of emerald. Through the tangle tears the roaring 
stream, showing here and there, among the palms, the tree ferns 
and the tufts of bamboo, a flash of silver. 

There is no tint of green that this valley does not parade, from 
the green of blue seas; to the green of malachite. There is no 
magic of sunlight and deep shade, no trickery of the waving wind, 
no illusion of the shifting mist, that it does not employ to enhance 
its fascination. Far off it ends mysteriously among the great hills, 
turning away along a defile into the secret recesses of the island. 

Some two days' journey from the coast is the Boiling Lake 
discovered by Dr. NichoUs in 1875. The following is his descrip- 
tion of it. " The Boiling Lake fills a small crateriform depression 
on the eastern slope of the Grand Soufriere Mountains. Sometimes 
the basin is empty, and then in the centre is seen the circular 
opening of a geyser. In times of activity boiling muddy water, 
heavily charged with sulphurous gases, is thrown up to a con- 
siderable height, until the accumulation in the basin forms the so- 
called Boiling Lake, and even then the position of the central 
orifice may be made out by the gyrating high mound of water 



DOMINICA. 167 

caused by the ejective forces below." ^ Photographs of this strange 
pool show it to be singularly dismal, desolate and unlovely. 

That it may be the haunt of the diablotin, or little devil (the 
bird who gives a name to the highest peak in Dominica), is 
possible, as that fowl has peculiar and doleful habits. The 
diablotin is said by Froude to be " a great bird, black as charcoal, 
half raven and half parrot." Others state that it spends its days 
in craters and its nights by the melancholy sea searching for fish. 
If this be true it is to be conceived that the unpleasant bird would 
find in the dead, sulphur-blasted, and boulder-strewn shores of the 
Boiling Lake all the charms of home. 

» Dominica, by Dr. H. A. Nicholls, C.M.G., Antigua. 



i68 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XXXII. 

VICTORINE AND HER FOREFATHERS. 

A SPECIAL interest attaches to Dominica in that it is — as 
Dr. Nicholls says — " the only island where pure-blooded descen- 
dants of the original inhabitants of the Antilles are to be found." 
There is in a remote spot on the north-east coast of the island 
a Carib Reservation provided by the Government. Here these 
ancient people live in peace and contentment. Although their 
numbers are diminishing, they can still muster about three hundred. 
" They pay no taxes, but are required to keep open the main road 
through the Reserve, and their chief receives a small stipend from 
the Government. They are now quiet, peaceful, and well man- 
nered. . . . They have lost all trace of their double language (for 
the men used to speak one language while the women spoke 
another), and occupy their days by fishing, making their celebrated 
waterproof baskets, and cultivating small plots of West Indian 
fruits and vegetables." ^ 

It would appear that the earliest-known inhabitants of the 
West Indian island were peoples of two types, the Arawaks and 
the Caribs. They both came from the South American mainland, 
the Arawaks from Northern Brazil, the Caribs from parts further 
south. Both are described as races of the Mongolic type, with 
yellow to olive-brown skin, long, lank, black hair, a broad skull, 
almond-shaped black eyes, slightly oblique, and bodies of moderate 
stature. The Arawaks were no doubt the earlier of the two to 
reach the islands, were savages of a low type, indolent, gentle and 
unprogressive. The Caribs, who gradually displaced these docile 
folk, were of greater average height, were fierce, warlike and 
' Dominica, by Dr. H. A. Nicholls, C.M.G., Antigua. 



VICTORINE AND PIER FOREFATHERS. 169 

intelligent, and frankly addicted to cannibalism. They could 
claim to be a race of fine people. Drake when he visited 
Dominica describes them as " very personable and handsome 
strong men." 

At the time of the discovery of the New World by Columbus 
the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas were inhabited by Arawaks, 
the Lesser Antilles by Caribs. It was a day of lamentation for 
the islander when he met with the enlightened white man, who 
came from the unknown East bringing with him the " blessings 
of civilisation." 

The place of meeting of these two was at an island called by 
Columbus San Salvador, but now known as Watling's Island. 
It received its latter name from a sin-hardened old pirate, John 
Watling, who was shot in 168 1 while attempting to plunder a 
city. It is a small island, some twelve miles in length, belonging 
to Great Britain, occupied mainly by salt-water lagoons and low 
wooded hills ; it yet manages to support a population of 600 people, 
and to merit a reputation for breeding excellent sheep and cattle. 
Watling's Island is the first land sighted by the mail steanjer in 
her homeward journey from New York to the West Indies. It 
should therefore be familiar to many. If the ship passes in the 
night there is still the flash from the lighthouse to show where 
the island lies. 

It was an ever-memorable morning, the morning of October 
12, 1492, a day portentous and terrible. The naked savage of 
San Salvador, when he gazed from the sea-commanding hills, 
must have wondered where the great water that spread eastward 
came to an end. The West he knew : there were familiar 
islands, and that wide continent which figured in the traditions 
of his tribe. As to the East, the white beach at his feet marked 
the extremest limit of the known world. From behind the 
eastern sea rose at dawn the sun and at night the stars, while 
from out of the same mystic heaven blew the abiding wind ; but 
nothing that had life had ever emerged from over the unchanging 
ocean rim. No canoe that had passed beyond that margin had 
ever returned to the land again. 



I70 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Now, on this October morning, there came from out of the 
unknown three fearsome things that moved upon the sea.^ The 
islander would behold the faint image of a towering ship made 
ghostly by the uncertain haze, and so colossal that its masts 
reached to the clouds. As the dawn broke he would see the foam 
about the sullen bows, the bellying sails, the castle on the fore, the 
tower on the poop. Every wondrous rope and spar would be cut 
clear against the tender light ; the rocking yards would stretch 
across the clearing sky ; the figures of men and the gleam of arms 
would be seen along the rail. It was not for him to know that 
the banner at the mizzen was the standard of Castile, and that the 
great cross painted on the mainsail was the sign of the Redeemer. 
This ship from out of the unimaginable abyss would seem to the 
islander to have sailed from the sun. As it came on the sky 
around it would break into lilac and crimson and gold, light would 
radiate from it as rays from a planet, and encircled by the many- 
coloured halo of the dawn, the majestic craft would roll towards 
the land. 

Columbus, clad in armour and wearing a scarlet cloak, landed 
on the beach with profound solemnity, and in this wise the wild 
man and his destroyer met. The simple naked folk brought as 
presents balls of cotton, spears and parrots, and received in 
exchange scarlet caps, beads, and hawk's bells. The foremost 
and ever present desire of the adventurer from Castile was that 
" the Lord in His mercy would direct him to find gold " : after 
that came a yearning to see these poor untutored people " free 
and converted to the Holy Faith." To see them free ; they who 
were as free as the sea-birds ! To strive that they may be " saved 
from the darkness of their happy innocence, and brought to the 
light of a religion that had just evolved the Inquisition " ! ^ 

It would have been happy if the bartering had ended with 
balls of cotton and hawk's bells ; but it soon became a traffic in 
which the only island goods that were marketable were human 
lives. 

• The three vessels of Columbus were the Santa Maria, loo tons, the Finta, 50 tons, 
and the Nina, 40 tons. 

" Christopher Columbus, by Filson Young, vol. i. page 107 : London, 1906. 



VICTORINE AND HER FOREFATHERS. 171 

The first settlement of the Castilians was on Haiti. The 
natives here — estimated at about a million in number — were the 
childlike, unresisting Arawaks. They were soon wiped off the 
earth. They were made to work as slaves in the mines until they 
died of starvation and excessive toil. They were massacred 
wholesale with appropriate treachery, were hunted down as if they 
were rabbits, were decimated by imported diseases, or beaten to 
death for not attending Mass. The gentle Queen Isabel did what 
lay in her power to protect them. Slavery was by her forbidden, 
but the prohibition was easily evaded by ingenious forms of 
indentured labour. It was urged, too, that it was good for the 
natives to work in mines, as idleness was demoralising. The poor 
Indians could not look after themselves, the slave-driver said, and 
moreover if they remained in their villages " it was impossible to 
instruct them in the principles of Christianity." Even supposing 
that t-hey were enslaved, murdered, or worked to death, at least in 
every instance they were baptised. 

When Haiti became depopulated the pious Spaniards extended 
the field of their missionary labours to the Lesser Antilles ; but in 
these islands the cause was not blessed, for they had to deal with 
the warlike Carib who was more than a match for them. Thus it 
was that these pioneers of civilisation turned their attention to the 
Bahamas. Here they kidnapped the docile islanders without 
having to murder very many of them, baptised the survivors and 
sent them to the mines to rot. 

It was never forgotten that the object of these man-hunting 
forays was to enable the Arawak to be instructed in the Holy 
Faith. " It would be necessary," explained the Governor of 
Haiti, " that they should be transported to Hispaniola (Haiti) ; 
as missionaries could not be spared to every place and there 
was no other way in which this abandoned people could be 
converted." ^ It was by this energetic method of extending 
the blessings of religion to the abandoned natives of the 
Bahamas that those islands became as bare of human life as 
a desert. 

' History of the Buccaneers, by Captain James Burney, R.N. : London, 1891. 



172 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The zeal with which the ministers of God from Spain kept the 
recently baptised savage from heresy and insured his attendance 
at Mass attracted the notice of such explorers as came to the New 
World. Samuel Champlain, for example, made a voyage into these 
waters between the years 1599 and 1602.^ He gives, in the book 
he wrote, a picture of seven Indians burning in one fire, while a 
couple of elaborately dressed Spaniards stand by to watch them 
roasting with unaffected boredom. The abandoned natives were 
probably being burned alive on account of inaccurate views as to 
the Real Presence, but as they were ignorant of the Spanish 
tongue the offence was small. 

In another engraving Champlain shows how the savage, after 
he had been brought under religious influences, was induced to 
attend the service of his church. At the door of a house of prayer 
stands a priest with a book in his hand. The fingers of the other 
hand are raised as if he were about to pronounce a blessing. In 
the forecourt an Indian is being beaten with a club by a very 
powerful man. The ecchymosed savage is gazing at the priest 
with curiosity. It is explained that the club, which would fell an 
ox, is a means of Grace whereby the thoughtless were led to attend 
to their devotions. It is further explained that each convert who 
was absent from Mass received at the hands of the athletic mis- 
sionary thirty to forty blows from the Gospel club in the precincts 
of the place of worship. 

Champlain in his account of the natives remarks that " they are 
of a very melancholy humour." Those who were irregular in 
their church attendances and who survived their bruises and 
broken ribs had certainly reasons for depression. 

The Caribs in the smaller islands, although they may have had 
the good fortune to escape the missionary, fell victims to the man 
with the musket and the man with a keg of brandy under his arm. 
They both came to him with lies on their lips and treachery in 
their hearts. The Carib had to fight for his life and for every foot 
of his native land. He had to fight in turn the Spaniards, the 
French, the English and the Dutch. It was the hopeless battle of 
1 Hakluyt Society, 1859. 



VICTORINE AND HER FOREFATHERS. 173 

arrow and spear against powder and ball ; the war of the naked 
savage against the world. The brown man, however, held his 
own valiantly. In Dominica he defied all comers for some two 
centuries and a half He had strength, sagacity and courage, and 
behind him the generous arms of an impenetrable forest He 
might have held his islands longer but for his taste for rum. 

During my stay at Dominica I was able, through the kindness 
of Dr. Nicholls, to make the acquaintance of a pure-blooded Carib 
from the Reservation. She was a girl of ten, whose name was 
Victorine. She was a picturesque little maid, with pretty manners 
and a singularly sweet voice. Her complexion was yellow-brown, 
her hair long, lank and black. She had the lacquer-black eyes of 
a Japanese doll, almond-shaped and a little oblique, a fine mouth 
and lips, slightly prominent cheeks. The type of her face was 
distinctly Mongolian, without the least suggestion of the negro in 
its outlines. She was as erect as an arrow and walked as only 
an Indian can walk. Her dress was of pink stripes, and her head- 
dress a primrose-coloured turban or madras. (See frontispiece.) 

Victorine was brought out to see the steamer. It was her first 
experience of a large ship. Everything delighted her except the 
engines. It was about the bath-rooms that she was the most 
curious, for in a quite imperious manner she signified that it was 
her pleasure to visit them a second time. She seemed to connect 
them somehow with religion. She was not as graceful in her 
mode of eating as in her walking. She was given tea, but declined 
the use of a saucer as superfluous. Whatever she ate was first 
dipped in the cup. 

Victorine could claim at least an interesting ancestry. Her 
people roamed the island for centuries before Columbus came. 
They saw the sailing hither of the first great ship the Marie 
Galante, They watched the landing of Drake and Hawkins when 
they came for " refreshing," just as now they may gaze at blue- 
jackets coming ashore from the modern ironclad. Victorine 
may not be " the daughter of a hundred earls," but among her 
forefathers might have been that " King of the Cannibal Islands " 
who is for ever famous in the English nursery song. 



174 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

She might still have been attracted by a scarlet cap, a string 
of beads, or a hawk's bell. None of these being at hand, she was 
offered her choice of certain commonplace articles. With a 
remarkable precision and with more than mere instinct she 
selected a purse and two half-crowns, those being the largest of 
the coins laid out before her. It was impossible not to feel that 
the most fitting present for this little wild thing, with her brown 
skin and piercing eyes and her wilder ancestry, would still have 
been a hawk's bell. 



XXXIII. 

THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS PASSAGE. 

As the steamer makes her way northwards again there comes into 
view, between Dominica and Guadaloupe, a blue-water channel. 
It is called The Saints Passage, not on the surmise that it leads to 
Heaven, but because athwart it lie Les Isles des Saintes as well 
as little Marie Galante. Here was fought, between Rodney and 
De Grasse, the bloody and momentous battle of April 12, 1782. 
It was an engagement upon which hung the fate of Great Britain 
in the West Indies, for it was a fight for the mastery of the sea. 

The English fleet came from Gros Islet Bay in St. Lucia, the 
French had sailed ahead of them from Martinique. Off Dominica 
Rodney, on April 9, caught up with the enemy. They approached 
one another stealthily, with catlike caution. There was a good 
deal of manoeuvring and shifting of place. Like two wrestlers, 
with every muscle on the strain, they faced one another, keen in 
the intent to obtain the best position before they came to the grip. 
On April 12 Rodney saw his opportunity : he closed in upon the 
French fleet and the battle to the death began. 

It lasted thirteen hours, and no one can say who fought the 
more gallantly, the French or the British. De Grasse was on 
board the great Ville de Paris, a ship with 104 guns and the 
finest man-of-war afloat. Rodney's vessel was the Formidable 
with 98 guns. Rodney was at the time a man of sixty-four, who 
had had his share of buffeting in the world, and was, moreover, 
ill with the gout. A man harsh and reserved, he kept himself 
aloof from his officers, having little of that camaraderie which 
distinguishes the followers of the sea. He fought the battle alone, 
with much grumbling and growling no doubt, but with infinite 
care and skill. 



176 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

As to the battle itself it was no mean sight at the end. There 
were over sixty ships of war engaged, and most of them had had 
belabouring enough by the time the sun set On many the flag 
had been hauled down. Some were being towed away helpless, 
while not a few were drifting about in silence, mere aimless 
wrecks. In the blue s'ky above the Passage of the Saints there 
hung still a fateful cloud of smoke. The pansy-coloured sea was 
strewn with spars and tangled gear, with ugly splinters of stout 
oak and strange things swept from disordered decks. Here it may 
be was a swimming man and there, behind him, the fin of a shark. 

The firing had become feebler and feebler until it had almost 
ceased. Quiet had fallen upon the outskirts of the fight, but in 
the centre was some hubbub still. Here was one ship which 
would not be silenced. Her upper works were shattered from 
bow to stern, her sails were in rags, her ropes and rigging hung 
from the spars like dead creepers in a wood, her decks were 
covered with the wounded and the dying. Yet still, from time to 
time — and the intervals became painfully longer — a puff of smoke 
would burst savagely from her battered ports. This was the 
French flagship, the Ville de Paris, the only vessel that had not 
surrendered. A last broadside was poured into her by the 
English, and now maimed, reeling, dazed, she made no answer. 

In a breathless silence the flag of France came down through 
the powder smoke, and any who could catch a glimpse of the 
sea between the hulls of the encircling ships would notice that 
a small boat was being rowed from the Ville de Paris to the 
Formidable. In the boat was Comte de Grasse on his way to 
surrender his sword to the British admiral. 

In the quiet, old-world square of Spanish Town in Jamaica is 
a memorial to Rodney, and in front of it stand two brass eighteen 
pounders. They are very daintily decorated, bear the date 1748, 
and, under a proud coat of arms, the name " Louis Charles de 
Bourbon, Comte d'Eu, Due d'Aumale." These were the two most 
cherished guns from the fighting deck of the Ville de PariSy and 
one may be allowed to think that from their grey-green muzzles 
was fired, on that day in April, the last defiant charge. 



XXXIV. 

ST. KITTS. 

Every reader of " Vanity Fair " will remember that from St Kitts 
came Miss Swartz, " the rich, woolly-haired mulatto," who was 
a parlour boarder at Miss Pinkerton's Select Academy for young 
ladies on Chiswick Mall. Miss Swartz, by reason of her being an 
heiress, ** paid double," but then she had the priceless advantage 
of learning the French tongue from no less a person than Becky 
Sharp. It will be recalled also that Miss Swartz, besides being 
woolly-headed, was acutely emotional, for it is recorded that when 
she parted with Miss Amelia Sedley at the Chiswick Academy, 
her " hysterical yoops were such as no pen can depict, and as the 
tender heart would fain pass over." 

Although St Kitts still produces woolly-haired young women, 
it is to be feared that few of them are heiresses, or are in a 
position to "pay double" at such a seat of learning as Miss 
Pinkerton's Academy. The island is distinctly prosperous, but the 
days for the making of large fortunes in sugar have long since 
gone by. 

St. Kitts will impress the visitor as being not only well-to-do but 
comfortable. Almost every available part of it is cultivated, for 
fields of sugar-cane climb far up the mountain sides. The island 
possesses excellent roads ; its villages are neat, while there is 
about them little of that squalor or air of dejection which is 
conspicuous in neighbouring settlements. After experience of 
such wild islands as St Lucia and Dominica, St. Kitts will be 
welcome, since it is, in a happy measure, free from the untidy 
tangle of the tropics, from the ever-repeated savage gorge and 

N 



1^8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

tree-bristling precipice. It is welcome to those who, in their 
journey among the islands, have become surfeited with the 
" everlasting hills " and the exigency of the restless and impor- 
tunate jungle. 

St. Kitts has much of the garden trimness of England, and 
something of the homeliness of the mother country. It is possible 
to drive for miles along a straight, white road, between fields 
which are not a little like fields of exalted corn, and by green 
slopes which might be covered by Brobdingnagian turnips. The 
road skirts the coast so that, ever and again, there opens out such 
a view of the sea and of long beaches as may be come upon 
within sound of the English Channel. By the roadside will be 
a little old stone church — such as the one near Palmetto Point — 
with a wooden tower, and in the churchyard the crumbling tombs 
of British settlers who died two centuries ago. Then in a dip 
among the trees will be a picturesque village of pewter-grey 
timber houses, with sun shutters and shingle roofs, shaded by 
palms, and half hidden by bushes of scarlet hibiscus. 

The village women — negresses and mulattoes — wear bright- 
patterned gowns and a turban or madras still more brilliant 
in hue. It is uncommon in the country, and even in the town, 
to see the coloured women disfigured by a slatternly imitation 
of European dress. 

The main part of the island (as viewed from the sea) shows 
one immense central mountain which pervades the whole territory, 
and sends forth trailing ridges from which spring secondary hills, 
such as those of Middle Range and the South-East Ridge. The 
parent mountain is called Mount Misery. It is an extinct volc"ano, 
4300 feet high, sour enough looking to justify its name. It keeps 
its dead crater hidden from sight, wrapped round by a shawl of 
clouds. All about the skirts of the hills are easy slopes and plains, 
cultivated to the last acre. 

The general colour of the island is lettuce-green — the green of 
the sugar-cane. This will be mottled here and there with brown 
where the sea-island cotton is growing, or will be slashed with 
streaks of ivy-green where a gully, stuffed with trees, roams down 



ST. KITTS 179 

the mountain side. Above the pleasant belt of lettuce-green are 
the dark hill summits and the clouds. Below it is the smooth 
blue of the sea. 

Basse Terre, the capital, is, like the rest of the island, clean, 
orderly and well content. It lies at the foot of a shapely height 
called Monkey Hill. Most of the houses are of wood, some are of 
grey stone. There is little that is ancient about the town, except 
the tombs in the churchyard, because it has suffered much from 
fire. It is a healthy wind-swept place, with a reputation for 
salubrity as far back as the time when Francis Drake and his 
fleet spent a Christmas here " to refresh our sick people, and to 
cleanse and air our ships." ^ To show that it is alive to what is 
expected of a chief city it has a public garden — Pall Mall Square 
— in the centre of which is the necessary insigne of greatness, 
a fountain. 

St. Kitts — or, to give it its proper name, St. Christopher — was 
never colonised by Spain. The first settlers were English, who 
landed in 1623 under the guidance of " a man of extraordinary 
agillity of body and a good witt," one Thomas Warner, Gent. 
The chief trouble of the newcomers was with the Caribs. In 1625 
a poor wreck of a French privateer crept into St. Christopher. 
D'Esnambuc, the captain of the battered ship, begged the English 
to give him refuge, and allow him and his crew of thirty men to 
land. He had been badly disabled in an engagement with a 
Spanish galleon, and for the moment had had enough of the sea. 
The English welcomed him as an addition to the force for fighting 
the Caribs. . • 

Thus it chanced that the island became partly British and 
partly French. The English settled at Sandy Point, just beyond 
Brimstone Hill, the men from the privateer at Basse Terre. It is 
unnecessary to say that this arrangement — like the Box and Cox 
tenancy — did not make for peace. So long as there were any 
Caribs to murder the two peoples were quite happy, but when the 
supply of wild men failed, then poor St. Christopher came to the 
knowledge that she had no abiding city. The island was some- 

' Hakluyt Society. Narrative by Thomas Gates. 



i8o THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

times French, sometimes English, and in uneasy intervals it was 
neither or both. The English had the last move in the game, for 
since 1783 St, Kitts has been a colony of Great Britain. 

Probably the most conspicuous feature of the island is Brim- 
stone Hill. The mound with this unpleasant name is some nine 
miles from Basse Terre by the white coast road of which mention 
has been made. An ancient church with a solid square tower is 
passed on the way, called Middle Island Church. Here will be 
found, in a dilapidated condition, the tomb of Thomas Warner, 
the founder of the colony. It would appear from the inscription 
on the stone that he bought an illustrious name "with losse of 
noble blood," and that having accomplished this purchase he died 
in March 1648. Brimstone Hill is an isolated precipitous mass of 
rock, 779 feet high, standing alone near the seashore opposite 
Mount Misery. It seems as if it had been tipped out of the crater 
of that mountain, for there are those who say that it would just fit 
into the cavity of the volcano. It belongs to no ridge nor range, 
and has the appearance of a wandering hill that has lost its way. 
Some portion of it is bare cliff, while the major part of the rock is 
covered with scrub. The hill was easily made a fortified place, 
and as such it was the centre around which the island fighting 
raged. 

As it at present stands every available portion of the rock is 
covered with defensive works and military buildings a century old. 
A steep, winding road leads up to the main gate. Within are 
steeper ramps and precipitous stairs, endless walls and parapets, 
roving passages, lines of barracks, gun embrasures by the score, 
redoubts, bastions, ravelins, sally-ports, stone-roofed magazines, 
officers' quarters, and a maze of cellar-like chambers. It is indeed 
a little town on a hill, a town of stone, whose walls have been 
blackened by years, while upon the whole of the rambling fortress 
has fallen the ruin of long emptiness and neglect. 

It is a purgatorial place to visit, especially on a hot day, and 
as a penance for those of uneasy conscience there can be nothing 
more satisfying than a climb to the solid mass of loopholed and 
battlemented masonry that crowns the summit of the height. Here 



ST. KITTS. i8i 

at least is the fort impregnable, the all-defying rock stronghold. 
To reach to even the drawbridge is to pass through more obstacles 
than ever -beset Christian in the " Pilgrim's Progress." Indeed the 
fortress on the peak might be that Doubting Castle whose owner 
was Giant Despair and whose chatelaine was Madam Diffidence. 
The massive door is just such an one as Mr. Greatheart knocked 
at, and at which he parleyed with the porter. 

I am afraid that this heavily armoured giant of a fort — in spite 
of all its bluster — must rank with the parlour warrior, for it has 
seen practically nothing of fighting. It was built in 1793 (as the 
date over the gate testifies), but by that time St. Kitts had passed 
through its many troubles and had entered upon the present long 
spell of comparative peace. 

The view from the summit of the works is very fine. At one's 
feet are the Caribbean coast of St. Christopher and the village of 
Sandy Point, where was once the capital of the English half of the 
island. A little way to the north are two sleek volcanic cones 
rising out of the sea. These are the strange and curious Dutch 
islands, Saba and St. Eustatius. 

High up on Brimstone Hill, on a ledge of the bare cliff, is the 
graveyard, where will be found the only chronicles of the fortress 
that are preserved among the ruins. From the tombstones it will 
be seen that the 9th Regiment was here in 1790, the 25th 
Regiment in 1808, and the King's Own Borderers in 181 1. It will 
appear also that on the hill lived women and children, for many 
are buried here. Death came quickly to some, as is shown by 
a monument to two boys aged respectively nine years and two 
years, the sons of a major of the 25th Regiment, who died within 
a few days of each other. 

Not the least interesting stone in the small cemetery bears the 
following curious inscription : 

Memorial Sacrum of John Boreham 

LATE soldier MY QTH REGIMT OF FOOT 

Dec 1790 Aged 38 
He left his wife Isabel and 4 children 
She erecd this stone as her last duty 



i82 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Should the ghost of the soldier's wife ever return to the island 
and to this little niche in the cliff where she fulfilled her Last 
Duty, she will find that, although the fort is abandoned and the 
barracks of the 9th Regiment are roofless and silent, the plot of 
ground is still carefully tended, the " Memorial Sacrum " is still 
intact, while by its side, as if it were Isabel's spirit, is an English 
rose in bloom. 



XXXV. 

ST. KITTS IN ALL ITS GLORY. 

Certain letters written from St. Kitts by Christopher Jeaffreson 
between the years 1676 and 1686 serve to give a graphic picture of 
the island in its heyday.^ Christopher was born in England in 
1650. His father, a Suffolk gentleman, was a friend and neigh- 
bour of that " man of extraordinary agillity of body " Thomas 
Warner, who founded the West Indian colony. In this enter- 
prise the agile Warner was joined by Christopher's father, who 
ultimately built a large house in St. Kitts and established a 
plantation there. 

Thomas Warner was a remarkable man, and his wife, in the 
matter of courage and devotion, was certainly no ordinary woman. 
She and her boy of thirteen left a comfortable home in East 
Anglia to join the pioneer party who were bent upon establishing 
a colony in the unknown West Indies. When the Warner family 
sailed from out of the English Channel into the open sea they had 
no idea where they were destined to land. The spirit of adventure 
must have been strong upon them, for a voyage of 4000 
miles in such a sailing ship as dared the seas in 1623 would have 
made faint the hearts of most. 

Christopher Jeaffreson on his father's death inherited the 
property in St. Kitts, and paid his first visit to the island in 1676, 
when he was twenty-six years old and, it may be added, already 
a widower. He left Billingsgate on February 16, 1676, in the 
Jacob and Mary, a vessel of 150 tons, carrying sixteen guns. 
He took with him four servants and reached St. Kitts on May 24, 

* A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century. London, 1878. 



i84 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

with no more than moderate adventures. His journey home, some 
ten years later, was more expeditious for it occupied only nine 
weeks. It was so tedious a voyage, however, that his joy was 
excessive when, after sixty-three days on the high seas, they came 
at last to an anchor in " Westcoat Bay a few miles above Margett." 
In his account of the wearisome home-coming he only regrets that 
they " were a little too lavish of their liquors at first." 

It appears from Christopher's letters that trade in the island 
was very brisk. There was no actual handling of money. Every- 
thing was paid for in sugar, indigo, or tobacco. Servants' wages 
were paid in sugar. A skilled artisan, after four years of free 
service, received 4000 lbs. of sugar per annum. This curious 
salary he exchanged for goods sent out from England. He must 
have found it difficult to save money in the island, for 4000 lbs. 
of sugar are not to be kept in a money-box, while the income of 
a few years would fill even a roomy cabin. Slaves were bought and 
sold in sugar. The purchaser of an estate could pay for it either 
in sugar, indigo or tobacco according to choice. Shopping, if con- 
ducted on the usual lines, must have been not only cumbersome 
but bared of much of its charm. For example, the wife of the 
Captain-General set her heart, writes Jeaffreson, upon a piece of 
Smyrna carpet which is described as being both " large and fine." 
The price of it was 1700 lbs. of sugar. The lady obtained the 
carpet, but how the sugar was weighed out and who handed it 
over the counter is not stated. 

If there was a tavern in the town, and if refreshments were to 
be paid for in cash, the winebibber must have taken a cartload of 
sugar about with him, together with a shovel and a pair of scales. 
Even if he trundled a wheelbarrow full of the commodity down 
to the inn, it may not have met his wants on a thirsty day, and 
in any case he would, when tipsy, have more than the usual 
difficulty in counting his change. As collections in church must 
needs be made in something less messy than sugar, or less apt to 
stain the fingers than indigo, it would be left to the worshipper, it 
may be supposed, to place tobacco leaves in the plate as the only 
available currency. 



ST. KITTS IN ALL ITS GLORY. 185 

St. Kitts, even in the younger Jeaffreson's time, was ex- 
ceedingly fashionable. The ladies were as modish and as elegant 
in their dress as were the belles of Lincoln's Inn Fields or Soho. 
The gentlemen, for their part, were equally exquisite and as 
devoted to point-lace and gilt sword bands as were the gallants in 
the Mall or Spring Gardens. Elaborate entertainments were in 
vogue, especially fine dinners, where the guests were waited upon 
by a crowd of negro servants in serge liveries, and where there was 
much drinking of madeira. Indeed Mr. Jeafifreson in a business 
letter remarks that the best " commoditie " in the island was 
" Madera wine." 

Close to St. Kitts is the island of Nevis. The two are so near 
together that the channel, as it sweeps between Windy Hill and 
Scotch Bonnet Head, is barely two miles in width. Nevis was 
destined to eclipse even St. Kitts as a mirror of fashion and as 
a resort of the most polished society. It was already the seat 
of what may be termed the court, since it had pleased the Captain- 
General to make his headquarters there. 

Now the lady who bought the Smyrna carpet for 1700 lbs. 
of sugar had a sister living with her at Government House. Her 
name was Mistress Frances Russell. She was fifteen years of 
age, and would receive on her marriage 1500 pounds (not of 
sugar but of English gold) and four negroes. The age at which 
most ladies married in West Indian circles was sixteen, and 
Christopher Jeafifreson, although now thirty-one years of age, 
gazed amorously upon Miss Frances Russell and determined to 
make her his. 

To go a-courting in a refined community like that of Nevis one 
must needs be well dressed. So Christopher wrote home at once 
for " a demi -castor hatt, a good perrewig, a laced cravatt and cuffs, 
a douzaine yards of ribbons for cravatt and cuffs, a fashionable and 
handsome sword belt, a payer of silke stockings, and enough silver 
and gold lace to lace my hatt round." It was an expensive ord^r, 
but the lovesick widower was a man of affairs, for he remarks, in 
a later letter, that if the clothes failed to reach him in time " they 
will not be lost but will come to a good market." 



i86 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Any agent can buy a demi-castor hat and a periwig, but there 
are articles of apparel which need a finer taste and a more cultured 
knowledge of the latest creations of fashion than a shipping agent 
could be expected to possess. Fortunately Christopher had a 
sister who lived in the very heart of gayest London. Her name 
was Madam Brett, and her address " Channell Row, Westminster, 
near the Mum House." Such a prize as 1500/., together with four 
negroes and Mistress Frances Russell in person, was not to be 
gained without cost, so Christopher writes to his worldly sister, 
" I praye you send me an embroidered and fashionable waist-belt 
and let everything be modish and creditable, for the better sort 
in these islands are great gallants." 

It is easy to picture the hopeful widower, in his demi-castor 
hat decked with gold lace, his silk stockings, and the killing waist- 
belt of Madam Brett's choice, being rowed over to Nevis on the 
first fine day after the ship came from England. He would have 
stepped ashore very daintily, and after arranging his periwig, 
sword, and cuffs on the beach, would have walked with a swagger 
up to Government House. He might have proposed to the lady 
kneeling on that very piece of Smyrna carpet which was so " large 
and fine." As a merchant he is almost sure to have figuratively 
expressed the weight of his devotion in pounds of sugar; as 
a passionate suitor he might have damaged the new demi-castor 
hat by pressing it to his chest. 

All which, however, is pure surmise. What we do know for 
certain is that Mistress Frances Russell, aged fifteen, gave this 
poor gentleman, who had spent so much on his clothes, " brisque 
denyall." There was an end of it. 

It was a heavy shock, and as Christopher was rowed back in 
the small boat to St. Kitts he must have gazed ruefully at his 
new stockings already spotted by the sea, and might have cal- 
culated to what amount in indigo he would have to debit himself 
for this laceration of his feelings. The published letters are 
silent as to the fate of the decided Miss Frances, but from the 
same source it is to be gathered that Mr. Jeaffreson never quite 
recovered from this " suddaine check in his progresse." 



ST. KITTS IN ALL ITS GLORY. 187 

St. Kitts as it advanced in prosperity continued to keep ever 
before it — heedless of hot suns and hurricanes — the resolve to be, 
at all costs, fashionable. In entertainments, in displays of silver 
plate and liveries, in dress, in gewgaws, in pure dandyism, the 
island outdid the old country. On Nevis certain hot springs were 
discovered, close to Charles Town. Now a hot spring was 
the one thing needed to make the islands a fitting resort for 
people of quality, for at the commencement of the eighteenth 
century the life of a man of taste and breeding could not be 
supported without a spa. 

At Nevis, therefore, a spa was established ; and here, to this 
Tunbridge Wells of the Caribbees, came all the fashionable of the 
West Indies — the rich merchants with their wives and daughters, 
the planters, the majors and captains who were invalided or on 
leave, and the officers of any ship of war that could make an 
excuse to anchor within sight of Booby Island. 

The great people arrived in schooners, with heaps of luggage 
and a tribe of black servants. From early to late they whirled 
round in one unending circle of gaiety. There were morning 
rides to the hills, picnic parties on Mount Pleasant, fishing 
expeditions to Newcastle Bay, dinners where heated men with 
loosened cravats proposed the toast of succeeding beauties, and 
dances which were kept up until sunrise, and indeed until the 
ponies were brought round to the door again. 

This led to many things — to strolls along the sands by moon- 
light, to many a saunter to the woods to look for fireflies that 
were never found, to many a whispered invitation to come out on 
the hill to see the Southern Cross that was forgotten before the 
hill was reached. Most memorable of all was the full-dress 
parade after the church service on Sunday ; for then " the 
Clarindas, Belindas, and Elviras of the period swept along, patched 
and painted, hooped and farthingaled a outrance with fly caps, 
top-knots and commodes, tight-laced bodices, laced aprons, and 
flounced petticoats, accompanied or followed by the 'pretty 
fellows,' who wore square-tailed silk and velvet coats of all colours, 
periwigged and top-hatted, silk-stockinged, and shoed with red- 



i88 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

heeled shoes, their sword-knots trailing a most on the ground, and 
their canes dangling from the fifth button." ^ 

Alas ! all this has passed away. The spa is silent and in 
ruins. ^ The roof of the great building has fallen in, while the 
balconies and verandahs, which witnessed so much simpering and 
such play of fans, have vanished to build cart-sheds. Still to be 
seen are the ball-room, the dining-hall, the overgrown Italian 
garden with its stucco statuary, and the court where the dowagers 
and chaperons gossiped and talked scandal. 

Most pathetic of all is the mounting stone by the door where 
the ponies waited ; a stone upon which many a satin-covered foot 
has rested until two strong arms outheld could lift a soft little 
figure down to the ground. 

' Newspaper account of the year 1707. 

* Paton's Down the Islands, page 284 : London. 1888. 



i 



XXXVI. 

STRANGE WARES. 

There were of course many things wanting at St. Kitts in the 
earlier period of its history. One of the most pressing needs was 
for malefactors. Malefactors were not only scarce, but they were 
fetching high prices, in spite of the discount allowed on taking a 
quantity. English malefactors, it may be explained, were in 
demand at St. Kitts to fill situations as servants and labourers, 
and to replenish the ranks of the island army. 

Christopher Jeafifreson, he of the demi-castor hat and the 
wounded heart, made heroic efforts to obtain for his island a 
befitting consignment of criminals. He petitioned the authorities 
of Newgate Prison for 300 miscreants, and almost wept for joy 
when he received the order for the same. 

But between getting the order and getting the actual footpads, 
rebels and shop thieves there is a great gulf fixed. Christopher 
found that he had to tip the chief gaoler at Newgate in the first 
place, and to tip him handsomely or not a convict would leave the 
premises. This avaricious official wanted from 45 j. to 55^. a 
head for each jail-bird — an expensive matter when a covey of 
300 is considered. Worse than that, there were underlings and 
assistant keepers, low-looking men with scars and black eyes, 
who grinned horribly at Jeaffreson when he stepped into the 
prison corridor after having disposed of the chief gaoler. These 
people, like the minor servants at a Swiss hotel, also wanted to be 
tipped, and hinted that they could make themselves even more 
offensive than they looked if they were not delicately subsidised. 

Jeaffreson, after much keen negotiation, found it best to regard 
the consignment as mixed goods, and to take the whole lot, men, 



/ 

ipo THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

women and children, in one parcel. In this way he was able 
to obtain a cargo of malefactors, including some very prime 
specimens, as well as many classed metaphorically as soiled or 
damaged, for the sum of 45J. a head. As prices were ranging at 
the time this was considered to be a genuine bargain. 

Mr. Jeaffreson's difficulties, however, were not yet over. The 
malefactor trade has its drawbacks. This sum of 45^. per head 
did not include delivery or carriage. The purchaser was informed 
that the jail-birds would be turned out into the street in front of 
Newgate at a certain hour, and would be (with the chief warder's 
compliments) at the purchaser's disposal. This is equivalent to 
assuring the buyer of a zoological collection that the beasts and 
reptiles selected will be in the road by the gate of the Gardens at, 
or about, a definite time. 

Mr. Jeaffreson had, in fact, to see his purchases safely 
conducted from Newgate to Billingsgate, where the convict ship 
was lying. To this end he must needs engage a guard of armed 
volunteers. Some of them would be his own friends, others would 
be club acquaintances, young bloods who were ready for anything, 
odd soldiers, footmen, watermen, and no doubt mariners from the 
convict vessel. The procession as it passed down Cheapside must 
have been one of the most revolting that historic thoroughfare 
ever saw. On either side would be the motley guard, some of the 
young bloods not quite sober perhaps, and some of the mariners 
already handy with their cudgels. In the centre would be the 
doomed men, handcuffed and chained together. 

A fearsome company they would be, haggard men, hatless, 
barefooted and unwashed. Some would be cursing, some pray- 
ing, some singing snatches of pot-house songs ; while some — 
the crazy — would rend the air with maniacal laughter. The 
accompaniment of this hideous processional hymn would be the 
tramp of the guard and the clatter of the chains on the cobble- 
stones. There would be boys running by the side, eager to miss 
nothing ; and in the moving crowd not a few of the drunken 
companions of the gang, who, as they reeled along, would 
hiccough beery consolation to the voyagers. There would be 



STRANGE WARES. 191 

slattern wives and weeping mothers too, who would try to press 
through the guard for one last grip of the manacled hand. The 
portly merchant would look his sternest as the rabble went by ; 
the little housewife who was about her shopping would draw her 
skirts aside and creep close to the wall, while from many a 
window both mistress and maid would gaze into the street with 
looks of loathing, which would soon change to looks of 
compassion. 

The malefactors, when they reached Billingsgate, were dropped 
into barges and taken off to the convict ship, to start on a voyage 
the horrors of which are beyond imagining. 

An account of just such a nightmare journey as they had 
knowledge of has been furnished by " one of the sufferers." He 
who wrote the log of this Ship of Sighs was one John Coad, 
a carpenter who took part in Monmouth's rebellion, and was, as 
a consequence, sentenced by Judge Jeffreys to be transported to 
the West Indian Islands with 800 others.^ 

Coad, still weak from his wounds, was kicked into the hold 
of a convict ship at Weymouth on October 17, 1685, near about 
the very year when Jeaffreson's select party from Newgate were 
starting westwards. The destination of the rebel carpenter was 
Jamaica. 

From his diary are to be gathered the following particulars of 
the sea passage. " The master of the ship shut 99 of us under 
deck in a very small room, where we could not lay ourselves down 
without lying one upon another. The hatchway being guarded 
with a continual watch with blunderbusses and hangers, we were 
not suffered to go above deck for air or easement." They were 
kept so short of food as to be nearly starved. " Our water also," 
writes Coad, " was exceeding corrupt and stinking, and also very 
scarce to be had." This was found to be " a great affliction after 
they came into the hot weather." 

The hold, being without light or air, soon became a fetid 

' A Memorandum of the Wonderful Providences of God to a poor unw&rtky creature 
during the time of the Duke of Monmouth's Rebellion, by John Coad, one of the 
sufferers : London, 1849. 



192 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. I 

human stye where filth fermented. " By which means the ship 
was soon infected with grievous and contagious diseases, as the 
small pox, fever, calenture, and the plague, with frightful botches. 
Of each of these diseases several died, for we lost of our company,' 
continues the chronicle, " 22 men, and of the sailers and free 
passengers I know not how many. . . . Others were devoured with 
lice till they were almost at death's dore." 

Those who know something of the stifling, breathless nights of 
the tropics, can imagine what the hold of this awful craft must 
have been when all was dark. Above fell the dismal tramp of 
the watch ; below — as if they were the dregs of the stinking air — 
lay the survivors of the ninety-nine. Some sang hymns and prayed 
aloud, says Coad ; others cursed the ship and the sea, the squire of 
the village who had led them astray, and the fiendish judge who 
had consigned them to this pit of despair. Whenever there was a 
lull in the voices there would still be the creaking of the ship, the 
stertorous breathing of the dying, and tlie groans of the sick who, 
as the writer expresses it, " lay tumbling over the rest." 

Possibly when sleep had fallen upon many, a man, delirious 
from small-pox, would spring up, and rush to and fro over the 
prostrate bodies with fearful shrieks, until he happily struck his 
head against a beam and fell down senseless. 

Well may the follower of Monmouth exclaim, " This was the 
straitest prison that ever I was in." 



XXXVII. 

THE LITTLE CAPTAIN OF THE "BOREAS.** 

Nevis, the co-partner of St. Kitts, is a noteworthy island. The 
part it has played in the pursuit of fashion has been already 
alluded to. Its most remarkable feature is its appearance, which 
is conspicuous by contrast rather than by any specific lineament. 
The adjacent islands are irregular, florid in colour, and unre- 
strained in outline ; wild in their forests and jagged peaks, they 
flaunt an air of profligacy. Nevis, on the other hand, is prim and 
neat, a dapper island. Its sea margin describes a decorous oval. 
Its surface is smooth. In its precise centre is a precise hill, cone- 
shaped and modest, while at either end of the oval is a smaller 
mound of the same pattern, as if the three were a set of ornaments 
on a mantelpiece. Thus it comes about that Nevis appears staid, 
old-maidenly and most genteel, when compared with the brazen- 
faced islands around — a Quakeress in a company of Spanish 
dancers. 

One of the most interesting memorials of Nevis is represented 
by a letter written by one young lady to another. It was a private, 
gossiping letter, intended only for one pair of eyes, yet it has 
become one of the most famous documents of a period. The 
writer addresses the note from the house of the President or 
Governor of Nevis — a Mr. Herbert. 

It reads as follows : " We have at last seen the little captain of 
the Boreas, of whom so much has been said. He came up just 
before dinner, much heated, and was very silent. He declined 
drinking any wine ; but after dinner, when the President, as usual, 
gave the three following toasts, 'The King,' 'The Queen and 
Royal Family,' and ' Lord Hood,' this strange man regularly filled 

O 



194 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

his glass and observed that those were always bumper toasts with 
him ; which having drank, he uniformly passed the bottle and 
relapsed into his former taciturnity. It was impossible for any 
of us to make out his real character ; there was such a reserve and 
sternness in his behaviour. Being placed by him, I endeavoured 
to rouse his attention by showing him all the civilities in my 
power ; but I drew out little more than * Yes ' and * No.' If you, 
Fanny, had been here, we think you would have made something 
of him : for you have been in the habits of attending to these odd 
sort of people." 

This strange, silent mariner, who only said " Yes " and " No," 
who would neither talk nor drink, but who jumped up promptly 
and tossed off a bumper at the mention of the words " The King," 
was Horatio Nelson. The " Fanny " to whom the letter was 
written was Mrs. Frances Nisbet, the young widow of Dr. Nisbet, 
late physician of Nevis. In what way she was qualified — as her 
friend declares — to attend to such odd sort of person as the captain 
of the Boreas we are not informed. Certain it is that she possessed 
the ability to make " something of him " for she married him. 

Nelson appears to have been often at the island, and to have 
been very friendly with the President. He met Mrs. Nisbet in 
1786 at Nevis, and at Nevis the two were wedded on March 11, 
1787. Nelson at this period is described as " the meerest boy of a 
captain," who dressed " in a full laced uniform, an old-fashioned 
waistcoat with long flaps, and his lank unpowdered hair tied in a 
stiff Hessian tail of extraordinary length." The marriage took 
place privately at a house called Montpelier, some way from 
Charles Town. Of this mansion nothing now remains but a " few 
trees and a little ruined masonry at the corner of a sugar-cane 
plantation." ^ 

Not far from Montpelier is the Church of St. John, Figtree. 
The church is a small plain building of stone, of the cemetery 
chapel type, and with no architectural ornament but a bell gable. 
In its register is a record of the Nelson marriage in the following 
words : 

' E'ien Phillpotts, In Sugar Cane Land: London, 1893. 



THE LITTLE CAPTAIN OF THE "BOREAS." 195 

"1787. March 11. Horatio Nelson, Esquire, Captain of his 
Majesty's Ship, the Boreas^ to Frances Herbert Nisbet, Widow." 

This is in no sense a marriage certificate, for the ceremony did 
not take place in the church ; it is neither signed nor attested, and 
is merely a note of an occurrence in the parish. 

On a slope of the hill immediately behind Charles Town are a 
few ruined walls and some remains of a terraced garden. These 
are the sole relics of the mansion in which Alexander Hamilton 
was born on January 11, 1757. His father was a Scots merchant 
who had married a French lady. Young Alexander left Nevis at 
the age of eleven to become for ever famous as " the precocious 
youth who penned the first draft of the constitution of the United 
States." 



196 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



xxxvni. 

THE ENVIRONS OF ST. KITTS. 

There are some very curious islands round about St Kitts. On the 
voyage north from Domenica, for example, the steamer passes 
close to the great rock Redonda, a smooth, pale fabric of stone 
rising out of the sea, like the dome of some immense submarine 
hall, whose span is a mile. It reaches to the height — according 
to the Admiralty chart — of looo feet. It is as bare as a pebble, 
but has boasted of as many as eighteen inhabitants at one time, 
the same being engaged in the exporting of phosphate of alumina. 

Close to the rock is the very beautiful and healthy island of 
Montserrat, colonised by the famous Warner, of St. Kitts. It is 
a peculiarity of this island that the negroes speak with a rich 
Irish brogue. This phenomenon is explained by the fact that in 
the seventeenth century the colony was peopled almost entirely by 
Irish. The pious care with which this attractive dialect has been 
preserved for over 200 years is illustrated by Ober in the following 
incident. 

An Irishman fresh from Donegal arrives at Montserrat, and 
leaning over the steamer's rail addresses himself, in the following 
terms, to a coal-black nigger who has come alongside with 
provisions. 

" Say, Cuffee, phwat's the chance for a lad ashore ? " 

" Good, yer honor, if ye're not afraid of wurruk. But me name's 
not Cuffee, an', plase ye, it's Pat Mulvaney." 

" Mulvaney ? And do yer mean to say ye're Oirish ? " 

« Oi do." 

' The saints dayfind us. An' how long have yer been out 
here ? " 



THE ENVIRONS OF ST. KITTS. 197 

" A matter uv tin year or so." 

" Tin year ! An' yez black as me hat ! Save me sowl, I tuk 
yez for a naygur." ^ 

To the east of the great rock Redonda is Antigua. This 
charming island is said to be pleasant to live in and to possess 
scenery very like that of England. It was here that Bartholomew 
Sharp in The Most Blessed Trinity ended his great but most 
unsanctified voyage (page 55). The history of Antigua is full of 
interesting incidents. Not the least curious of these is associated 
with the life and times of Daniel Park, who in the days of good 
Queen Anne was her Majesty's representative in the island. 
That there was " something against " this gentleman, and that he 
failed to win the affection and esteem of the islanders, may be 
inferred from the following allusion to his arrival at Antigua. 
This event is spoken of as the occasion when " that abominable 
and atrocious governor, Daniel Park, arrived to blast for a time 
with his unhallowed breath this beautiful island." 

An exhaustive estimate of Park's character is hardly to be 
deduced from the accident of his "unhallowed breath," but is 
rather to be based upon a study of his social qualities as a whole. 
These were quite remarkable. He was a Virginian who, having 
committed murder at a gambling table, deserted his wife and fled 
to England. Here, listening to the promptings of his heart, Park 
realised that he had so far mistaken his vocation, and that he was 
by nature fitted to become an English country gentleman. Under 
this conviction he at once purchased an estate and was by the 
honest electors of the district returned as their member of 
Parliament. It would seem, however, that he was not destined 
to be a politician, for he was promptly expelled from the House 
of Commons for bribery. Feeling that he was still misunderstood 
he fled to Holland, incidentally pursued by a captain of the 
Queen's Guard whose wife he had dishonoured. He here joined 
the forces of the Duke of Marlborough, and was so highly appre- 
ciated by that general that he appointed him his aide-de-camp. 

Circumstances arose which made it necessary that this versatile 

' Our West Indian Neighbors, by F. A. Ober : New York, 1904. 



198 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

man should be dismissed from the British Army, and, to render 
the process as Httle trying to his feelings as possible, he was sent 
to England with the news of the victory at Blenheim. Whether 
he was met by a deputation of his late constituents and tenants 
headed by the captain of the Queen's Guard is not known, for no 
ballad records " How Park brought the good news to London." 
Queen Anne, however, was so gratified by the announcement 
of the victory that she forthwith made the much-travelled Daniel 
her governor in Antigua. Here, in Government House, Park 
seems to have developed the " unhallowed breath " which for 
a time at least was destined to blast the island. His career as 
a colonial administrator was short, and is summed up in the 
following words, " he lost no time in provoking a riot in which 
he was killed by a mob who, exasperated by his crimes, literally 
tore him to pieces in the street." If Park was a man who had 
yearnings for a quiet and simple life his ambition was never 
attained. 

The traveller on his way from St. Kitts to the next port of call, 
St. Thomas, will pass close to the islands of St. Eustatius 
and Saba. St. Eustatius — generally called Statia for short — is 
a little Dutch island with a remarkable past. It consists of two 
crater cones with less hilly ground between them. The main 
mountain is 1950 feet high, is wonderfully symmetrical, and, 
being all-predominating, gives to the island its gracious pyramidal 
outline. The symmetry of the hill would be complete were it not 
that the southern slope is broken off abruptly at the sea margin, 
leaving a bare white cliff, 900 feet high, called the White Wall. 

The only town is Orange Town, which lies partly on the beach 
and partly on the cliffs adjacent. The two divisions communicate 
by a long, steep, sloping road. On the brink of the cliff stands 
an ancient and ruinous fort. Fort Orange, where still, it is said, 
a few rusty and dismounted cannon are to be found among the 
cactus and acacia. Recent visitors to the island speak of the town 
as poverty-stricken, dilapidated, and melancholy, its church and 
chief houses as decayed, and its business as well-nigh invisible. 
Along the beach in its whole length, are the ruins of warehouses 



THE ENVIRONS OF ST. KITTS. 199 

and stores, together with other relics of what must have been 
an immense shipping trade. These scattered ruins, as the Wesi 
India Pilot remarks, " attract attention on first landing." 

Now it will scarcely be believed that this barren rock of 
an island, with its sleepy and dejected town, once rivalled the 
prosperity of Tyre and Sidon. Yet the biographer of Rodney 
states that such was its state for at least some glorious months.^ 
Still more astonishing is a statement in the " Annual Register " that 
at the foot of this crater cone standing out of the sea, was once 
held " one of the greatest auctions that ever was opened in the 
universe." If the Auctioneers' Institute have not the island 
of St. Eustatius as its crest, it is only because the members of that 
body have failed to realise the crowning magnificence of the sale 
of goods once held at Orange Town. 

Statia became the rival of Tyre and Sidon and the paradise 
of the auctioneer after the following manner. Just before the 
outbreak of war between England and her American colonies 
commercial affairs in the West Indies were so hampered 
by enactments that trading of any sort became practically 
impossible. The Dutch, with a ready eye to business, made 
St. Eustatius a free port. The result was to throw the whole 
of the trade between England or her West Indies and the 
American plantations into the market-place of Orange Town. 
When the French sided with the Americans their merchants also 
made all haste for the astonished island. 

Statia, however, did not draw the line at legitimate buying 
and selling. It became the great depdt of contraband of war, 
a smuggling centre and an arsenal for both the American and the 
French forces. Dutch men-of-war convoyed American privateers ; 
American cargo ships carried Dutch papers. Goods poured in 
from Europe every day in the week, while planters on the 
neighbouring islands, both French and English, thought it well 
to hurry their possessions off to Statia for safer keeping. 

The result was that the island became such a storehouse as the 
world has never seen. All day long and for most of the night 

' Rodney, by David Hannay, page 151 : London, 1891. 



200 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

boats were toiling through the surf which ever breaks on the little 
beach before Orange Town, More than a hundred merchant 
ships at a time would be swinging to their anchors in the once 
deserted roadstead. Warehouses were erected line after line along 
the sands. The carpenters' hammers almost drowned the shouts 
of the seamen, stevedores, and slaves who struggled in a mob 
along the water's edge. Bags, boxes, and bales were stacked 
in the street for want of room in the sheds. Merchants and 
clerks, hot and perspiring, were busy from sunrise to sundown. 
A pile of tea chests in the road had to serve as an office table, 
while every pocket was stuffed with invoices, bills of lading, 
letters, ship chandlers' accounts, and miscellaneous samples. 

Jews flocked to the fray. The market-place was made 
deafening by voices, yelling in Dutch, English, French, and 
Spanish, until the great pyramid that rose above the roofs might 
have belonged to the Tower of Babel. 

This abnormal development of the island was not appreciated 
by the English, and so, on February 3, 1781, Rodney came down 
upon the dismayed Orange Town and possessed himself of it and 
all that it contained. It contained a great deal — goods to the 
value of four million pounds sterling, to say nothing of the 150 
merchantmen lying in the bay. " The Jews were stripped to the 
skin and sent packing. The Dutch had surrendered at discretion 
and were treated after the manner of Alaric. To the French, 
who were open enemies, Rodney showed more consideration. 
They were allowed to go with bag and baggage." ^ Then began 
the great sale, the sale of four million pounds'" worth of goods 
without reserve, the great auction of the universe. In this wise 
St. Eustatius became the scene of the apotheosis of the auctioneer. 

After all the purchases had been cleared away, after the last 
ship had set sail, and after the streets had become empty and still, 
the exhausted inhabitants returned to the selling of yams. As 
they gazed down from the cliif upon the long row of deserted 
warehouses, and upon the awful litter on the beach, they must 
have felt that the little island had at least had its day. 

' Rodney f by David Hannay, page 154: London, 1891. 



XXXIX. 

SABA THE ASTONISHING. 

Close to St. Eustatius is the island of Saba, a place so curious 
that it must rank with the islands of romance and not with things 
of this world. It is small and round, has a diameter of two miles, 
and belongs to the Dutch. It is the pinnacle of a volcanic 
mountain of which only the peak and crater emerge from the sea. 
Possessing no beach, Saba is, in the words of the mariner, " bold 
and steep-to " all round. Its circuit indeed is that of the wall of 
some Cyclopean fortress. As " in general a heavy surf breaks all 
along the shore " it is not a place to land at, landing being 
indeed " extremely difficult and often dangerous." 

Possessing no harbour nor anything approaching the same, 
Saba has yet a harbour master among its high officials. Possessing 
no springs, " the inhabitants chiefly depend on rain water caught 
in tanks." ^ There are no roads in Saba for it is " a mass of 
rugged mountains, with deep and precipitous ravines, through and 
over which are only foot-paths from house to house." ^ Unlike 
any other West Indian island, the majority of the population are 
white, and " not only white," writes Ober, " but Dutch, the good 
old-fashioned kind, with blue eyes, freckled, sandy complexion 
and flaxen hair." The inhabitants being Dutch speak English as 
their native tongue. The only town in Saba is on the mountain 
top, and being so placed it is called Bottom. In this nomen- 
clature the founders of the colony have evidently followed the 
weaver in " A Midsummer Night's Dream," who, speaking of his 
vision, says " it shall be called Bottom's Dream because it hath no 
bottom." 

' IVest India Pilot, vol. ii. page 149 : London, 1899. ' Ibid. loc. cit. 



202 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Now the city of Bottom can hardly be said, in the terms even 
of the speculative builder, to occupy an eligible site, for it is 
placed inside the crater. If the citizens wish to gaze upon the 
sea they must climb to the rim of the crater, as flies would crawl 
to the edge of a tea cup, and look over. They will see the ocean 
directly below them, at the foot of a precipice some 1 300 feet high. 
To go down to the sea it is necessary to take a path with a slope 
like the roof of a house, and then to descend the Ladder, an 
appalling stair on the side of the cliff marked at the steepest part 
by steps cut out of the face of the rock. There are many people 
who would die rather than face the Ladder. Some would 
probably die if they did face it, but then Saba does not lay itself 
out to attract visitors. 

Mr. Ober has given an account of his arrival at Saba, He 
reached the island at night in a drogher. "At last," he writes, 
" we got in near enough to launch a boat, into which I was 
tumbled, together with my belongings. Two stalwart black men 
pulled it within hail of the shore, and then, instead of landing, 
they split the darkness with shouts for help, yelling to some 
invisible person in the clouds to ' Come down.' The boat shot 
ahead with terrific speed straight for the rocks, and just as the 
shock of the impact with those rocks sent me tumbling head over 
heels, a strong arm seized me, yanked me out unceremoniously, 
and set me upright at the base of the cliff. So there I was, alone 
with several strange folk, number undetermined, until a lantern 
was lighted, when it was reduced from a multitude to two. They 
were black, both of them, and evidently friendly, for, after piling 
my luggage at the foot of the precipice, they took me by the arms 
and guided me to what they called the 'Ladder,' which was 
a narrow trail up the side of the said precipice. It was fortunate 
for my shattered nerves that the darkness hid the dangers of that 
trail from sight, for when I afterwards saw it by daylight, no 
money would have tempted me to essay it." ^ 

It is to be noted that provisions and goods destined for Bottom 
have to be brought up the Ladder, so that if one of the fair-haired 

' Our West Indian Neighbors , page 271 : New York, 1904. 



SABA THE ASTONISHING. 203 

maidens ordered a grand piano, it would be delivered to her by 
that particular route. Hill, in his work on Cuba and Puerto Rico, 
gives a photograph of the city of Bottom. It consists of a 
number of small and tidy houses dotted about among a perfect 
maze of stone walls. There are gardens around some of the 
dwellings, but the metropolis, regarded generally, has the reckless 
aspect to be expected of a town situated in a crater, and connected 
with the outer world by such an approach as the Ladder. 

Living aloft in their volcano, in a summit city called Bottom, 
these simple Dutch people who speak English reach the extreme 
of the improbable in the nature of their staple industry. They do 
not make balloons nor kites. They are not astronomers, nor are 
they engaged in extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere. They 
are, of all things in the world, shipbuilders, and shipbuilders of 
such merit that their boats and small craft are famous all over the 
Windward Islands. Let it be noted that fishing smacks are not 
only built in a crater, but on an island which has neither beach, 
harbour, landing stage, nor safe anchoring ground, where no 
timber is produced, where no iron is to be found, and where 
cordage is not made. The island has indeed, except in the 
matter of size, no more facilities for the development of the ship- 
building trade than has a rock lighthouse. The production of 
ships from craters is hardly less wonderful than the gathering of 
grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. 

When the Saba ship is finished it is lowered down the side of 
the cliff, and has then apparently to shift for itself. The women, 
no doubt, wave handkerchiefs from the rim of the crater as the 
craft takes the sea, while the boys are told not to play with stones 
lest they should fall upon their fathers' heads. After all the 
excitement of the launch is over, one can imagine the master- 
builder climbing up the Ladder to his crater home, as full of pride 
as his shortness of breath will allow. 



204 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



XL. 

ST. THOMAS. 

Another dawn, another dim island taking shape out of the mist, 
another blue bay in a circle of hills, and the steamer drops her 
anchor with a splash in the harbour of St. Thomas. 

St. Thomas is a Danish island that has seen better days. It is 
one of the Virgin Group, a cluster of some hundred islands, rocks 
and cays. Columbus named them after St. Ursula and her virgins, 
and would no doubt have given saintly names to the entire 
hundred, but the buccaneers who haunted these regions have left 
their mark rather than his in such titles as Rum Island, Dead 
Man's Chest, Salt Water Money Rock, Fallen Jerusalem, 
Flanagan's Pass, and the like. 

They are wild, inhospitable islands, the most savage of which 
is Anegada, or the Drowned Island, thus called because it is 
water-logged with lagoons and is so low-lying as to be almost 
sea-swept in times of storm. Yet this amphibious place has a 
population of 450. It has been the scene of countless wrecks, 
since around it is the deadly and much-accursed Horse Shoe 
Reef. 

It was Anegada that brought to an end the sea rovings of that 
wild, impetuous Don Quixote who was " like a perpetual motion," 
Prince Rupert of the Rhine. He started from Ireland in 1648, 
with seven ships, to champion the cause of the king in the far 
west. He sailed m the Swallow and, finding few opportunities 
for legitimate battle, took to pirating. He was a man who must 
always be doing something. Even when he was in prison at 
Linz, in his early days, he managed to learn drawing and make 
love to the governor's daughter. After five years on the sea, more 



ST. THOMAS. 205 

full of adventure than has been the life of any corsair before or 
since, he was caught in a storm off the Virgin Islands one night 
in September. Here on the dire shore of Anegada his fleet was 
wrecked. His brother, Prince Maurice, was lost with his ship 
Defiance ; the Honest Seaman was cast away, and the only survivor 
of the dare-devil argosy was the Swallow. She crept home sadly 
crippled, and gained the coast of France in 1653, but " was too far 
spent and never put to sea again." The handsome, clever, wilful 
prince, who was ever " very sparkish in his dress," lived till 1682, 
to die in his bed in Spring Gardens of a commonplace fever. 

Charlotte Amalia, the capital of St. Thomas, is without any 
question the most picturesque town in the whole sweep of the 
Windward Islands. Placed within a magnificent harbour, and at 
the foot of a circle of green hills, Charlotte Amalia makes there a 
bravery of colour. The town is built about three rounded spurs 
which jut out from the mountain's base. It seems, therefore, to be 
made up of three towns joined along the sea margin, each of the 
three a cone of bright habitations reared against the dull green of 
the hill. 

The walls of the houses which are thus piled one above the 
other are, for the most part, a dazzling white. Some are yellow 
or grey or orange ; certain of them are blue. The roofs are always 
a generous bright red. Between the houses and overshadowing 
the roofs are clumps of green trees. Here and there can be seen 
stone stairs climbing up through the town, gardens with creeper- 
covered walls, a tufted palm, a many-arched arcade, the balustrades 
of shady terraces. Viewed from the sea Charlotte Amalia would 
seem to be a place for those who make holiday — all gaily tinted 
villas and palaces, where the factory chimney, the warehouse, and 
the woful suburb are unknown. 

Viewed at close quarters it is a little less charming. A long, 
level street, clean and bright, runs from one end of the settlement 
to the other. The remaining streets are engaged in clambering up 
the sides of the three hills. The town contains many handsome 
buildings, a few of which are dignified by age, together with shops 
and stores of the colonial type which breathe generally the odour 



2o6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

of bay rum. The names of the streets are in Danish, as are also 
certain official notices, but with these exceptions there is little to 
suggest a colony of Denmark. The language of the people is 
English, the newspaper is in English, while the determination of 
the islanders to profess that tongue is shown in the following 
tavern wall announcement which faces the stranger on landing : 

" Cool sherbert and other such sippings." 

The island itself — as surveyed from the summit of the hill 
above the town — is a little desolate. The country appears to be 
uninhabited, given up to loneliness and allowed to grow wild. It 
is covered everywhere with low bushes, as if the land had relapsed 
again into savagery. At one's feet, looking northwards, is a 
most enchanting sandy cove, bordered by a circle of white foam 
where it meets the sea. This is just such a solitary beach as 
Robinson Crusoe might have found himself upon, and just such a 
stretch of sand as that on which he discovered the footprints of 
Friday. Far away are some rugged islands, which seem to belong 
to a world from which man has long departed. These are the 
rocky islets of Tobago, Hans Lollik, and Jost van Dyke. 

St. Thomas once had an evil reputation for unhealthiness. 
The cemetery in the town testifies that this was not unmerited, 
and that there were some grounds for Kingsley's description of 
the place as " a Dutch oven for cooking fever in." Now, thanks 
to enlightened sanitary measures, it can claim to be a quite 
wholesome settlement. 

The hospital of St. Thomas is on the outskirts of the town. 
It is a hospital of seventy beds, maintained by the Government, 
but at the same time very generously dowered by the good 
Queen of Denmark. The majority of patients are negroes of an 
unsavoury type, who seem to be the subjects of only such 
disorders as are obtrusively unpleasant. Many are insane or 
paralysed — for rum is cheap in St. Thomas. Many are the 
victims of loathsome, long-neglected sores. It is a depressing 
place, even for a hospital, a dreary yard surrounded by low, 
one-storied buildings, with corrugated iron roofs. Yet everything 



ST. THOMAS. 207 

is clean and in perfect order, while the care of the sick is above 
criticism. 

Moving busily from hut to hut in the compound is a bright, 
happy-looking Danish lady. She is the good genius of the dismal 
square, the matron, the nurse, the friend, the comforter. With the 
exception of a servant she is the only white woman in this refuge 
for the miserable. She lives here alone, cut off from all the 
reasonable joys of life, uncomplaining, undaunted, a rare and 
heroic figure. The sick people to whom she devotes her life are 
Danish subjects, fed and housed by Denmark, but they neither 
speak the language of the country which fosters them, nor have 
they, it would seem, the least concern in its existence. Dirty for 
the most part, ill to manage, not free from sordidness, they are 
ungracious and ungrateful, and yet to their care this noble woman 
devotes ungrudgingly her sympathy, her motherliness, her con- 
summate skill. 

At Scutari the " Lady of the Lamp " moved through grateful 
wards with the eyes of her country upon her. Here, in an 
obscure hospital in a far-off island, a sister of mercy ministers to 
unheroic sick who own her not, who will not call themselves her 
countrymen, and who see not in her smiling face the graciousness 
of self-sacrifice. 



2o8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP, 



XLI. 

MEMOIRS OF EDWARD TEACH, MARINER. 

On the respective summits of two of the hills of Charlotte Amalia 
there stands a castle. The larger is called Blue Beard's Castle, 
the smaller Black Beard's. It is claimed that they were the 
strongholds of pirates distinguished by those names. St. Thomas 
was certainly a favourite haunt of the buccaneer, and, although the 
sea rover had little leisure for building castles, he was not above 
occupying premises erected by others. 

The two strong places in question are round towers of 
undoubted antiquity, each with a maximum of wall and a 
minimum of window. Blue Beard's Castle has the appearance of 
a fortress or refuge of the block-house type, but the castle of 
Black Beard is singularly suggestive of a stone windmill deprived 
of its wooden caps and sails. It would be little short of profanity 
to hint that this pirate's lair is no more than a discarded mill, for 
the people of the island, although hazy in their details, are firm in 
the belief that the tower was the fastness of Black Beard, the 
corsair. Of Blue Beard nothing whatever is known, nor do even 
the sellers of postcards suggest that he was in any way connected 
with the famous autocrat of the nursery tale. Black Beard, how- 
ever, was a definite character, a pirate of pirates, who in the early 
part of the eighteenth century was the terror of the Caribbean 
Sea. I can find no evidence that he ever held the mill-like tower 
which keeps green his memory in St. Thomas, but it would be 
rank heresy to suppose that such evidence is not forthcoming. 

Black Beard's non-professional name was Edward Teach. 
He was a native of Bristol, and a mariner. In the pursuit of his 
calling he came to Jamaica, where, it may be assumed, he was led 



MEMOIRS OF EDWARD TEACH, MARINER. 209 

astray by evil companions, picked up in the taverns of Port Royal. 
Anyhow, in 1716 Master Teach took to pirating. It is claimed 
that when a man adopts a calling he should strive with all his 
might to excel in it. Edward was evidently influenced by this 
teaching, and acted upon it, with the result that he attained to the 
very highest distinction in his profession. Indeed, such were his 
ability and application that in two short years he rose to the 
position of the world's greatest pirate. In this anxious and 
dangerous vocation he is without an equal. The stage pirate with 
black ringlets and a belt full of knives, who sits on a gunpowder 
cask and scatters murder aimlessly around him, is a mere babe 
and suckling to Edward Teach. 

This highly depraved mariner was no mere cut-throat, how- 
ever : he was the Napoleon of scoundreldom. There is a portrait 
of him in Johnson's " History of the Pyrates." ^ He is here repre- 
sented as a large man whose repulsive face is almost hidden by 
a mane-like beard, the hair of which, black as coal, grew up to his 
very eyes. So long was this beard that he twisted it into small 
tails tied with ribbons, " after the manner of our Ramilies wiggs," ^ 
and turned the ends over his ears. He had a head like a brindled 
gnu. Under his hat, which was of felt and of the Dick Turpin 
pattern, he stuck lighted matches or fuses which, when he was 
at work, would glow horribly on either side of his eyes. He is 
depicted in a long-skirted coat with immense cuffs to the sleeves, 
and in breeches, stockings, and shoes. In his hand is a cutlass, 
while in his belt no less than six pistols are stuck. It is to be 
noticed that he avoids the open jack-boots, the hat feather and the 
immense belt buckle of the common stage villain. 

Teach was an execrable and unholy rascal, who was a shudder- 
ing horror to every one with whom he was associated. He 
occasionally robbed and murdered his own crew. Once, when in 
a blithesome mood, he marooned seventeen of his men on a desert 
island. Here they would have starved to death, as he hoped 
they would, had not Major Stede Bonnet, the amateur freebooter 

' Vol, i. : London, 1726. ' Johnson's History of the Pyrates. 

P 



2IO THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

of Barbados, come to their rescue.^ It was just about this period 
that Teach married as his fourteenth wife " a young creature of 
sixteen." It is not stated how it came about that she was drawn 
to Teach, or by what charms he won her budding affection. 

Black Beard was a man of resource, who could be relied upon 
to invent means for relieving even the monotony of a dull voyage. 
Thus one bright afternoon, when the sloop was lying becalmed 
and rocking to the lazy roll that makes the ocean in the tropics 
appear as if it breathed, the pirates found the time pass heavily. 
They had polished their weapons until they shone like silver. 
They had gambled until half the company were penniless. They 
had fought until there was nothing more to fight about, and it was 
too hot to sleep. Indeed there was nothing to be done, but to 
lean over the rail and throw bits of rotten beef at the sharks. In 
this dilemma the ready-witted Teach, hatless and shoeless, and 
" a little flushed with drink," stumbles up on deck, and, holding 
on to the shrouds, makes this happy proposal to his bored 
companions. " Come," says this genial soul, " let us make a little 
hell of our own, and see how long we can bear it." Whereupon he 
and two or three others, helped by suggestive kicks, drop down 
into the hold and, having closed the hatches, sit on the stones of 
the ballast. Here in the reeking dark they set fire to " several 
pots full of brimstone and other inflammable matters," and so 
produced a replica of the atmosphere of the Pit. The captain's 
playmates, livid with asphyxia and with faces streaming from the 
heat, soon made a rush for the sunny deck, but Teach's ugly head 
was the last to come up the hatch, and it was always a pride and 
a pleasure to him to remember that he held out the longest, while 
he was always gratified to hear that his face, on emerging, was as 
the face of a half-hanged man. 

This distinguished pirate had, besides his ready wit, social 
qualities of quite a rare order. For example, one night he was 
entertaining in his cabin two friends — Israel Hands, the master of 
the sloop, and the pilot who had brought the ship into harbour. 
The entertainment seems to have consisted mainly in the con- 

* See page 25. 



/ 

MEMOIRS OF EDWARD TEACH, MARINER. 211 

sumption of tobacco and rum. The small cabin, lit as it was by 
a solitary candle, was probably close. During a pause in the 
conversation Teach, with a smile on his face, cocked two pistols 
carefully, then, blowing out the candle, he crossed his hands and 
discharged the weapons at his company. As the outcome of this 
unexpected attention, Israel was shot through the knee and lamed 
for life. "The other pistol," the chronicle says, "did no execution." 
When the candle was relit, the captain's guests very naturally 
asked him what he meant by this display of musketry. He 
replied by damning them both to eternal fire, and, after cursing 
them at sufficient length, he explained, in a friendly way, that 
" if he did not kill one of them now and then they would forget 
who he was." 

Probably Hands as he lay on the floor, watching the blood 
spurt out of his knee, may have muttered that he did not believe 
in artificial aids to memory. 

Edward's end was not peace. He and his allies had so harried 
the American Main, that in 17 18 the Lieutenant-Governor of 
Virginia offered a reward of 40/, for the capture of any pirate 
captain, and the special prize of 100/. for Edward Teach, alive or 
dead. 

Black Beard at the moment was resting from his labours. He 
had hit upon a green sheltered cove at the mouth of the Ocracoke 
inlet, a romantic spot that pleased his fancy. His whereabouts 
was revealed to a certain Lieutenant Maynard, of H.M»S. Pearl, 
who lost no time in manning a sloop and starting for Teach's 
quiet haven. Now Teach was.4nformed that Maynard was after 
him, but the pirate declined to stir. He had no regard for 
Maynard and, moreover, the placid scenery of the creek comforted 
him. Indeed he prepared to meet the man-o'-war's man by 
drinking all night with a merchant skipper who chanced to have 
dropped in. 

As the morning dawned Maynard crept up the inlet, and there 
to his joy was the pirate craft lying at her anchor, a picture of 
peace. As the Pearls sloop approached. Black Beard seized a 
hatchet and cut his cable, with the result that his vessel, on which 



212 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

was now hoisted a black flag, drifted ashore. This was a nimble 
move, for the buccaneer saw that the sloop drew too much water 
to come near him, and Maynard, realising that fact also, anchored 
within half-gunshot of his quarry. Neither vessel carried any 
ordnance. 

Maynard was determined to get alongside the pirate, so with 
desperate haste he began to throw his ballast overboard, together 
with the kedge and every spar and scrap of iron he could spare. 
More than that he staved in every water cask ; until feeling that 
he had freeboard enough he slipped his anchor, set his mainsail 
and jib, and bore down upon the stranded sea robber. 

As he came on Teach, with the fuses glowing under his hat, 
" hailed him in a rude manner," cursed him and defied him in fact, 
and standing on the tafifrail drank to his speedy damnation in a 
goblet of liquor. The man-o'-war's man now sent off a boarding 
party in small boats, which same Teach met with such a volley 
of small shot that he killed and wounded twenty-nine men, 
leaving scarcely crew enough to row back to the sloop for shelter. 
After this incident Teach's ship " fell broadside to the shore," with 
her deck all aslant. 

Maynard sailed slowly nearer with his canvas hanging slack, 
for the wind was very light. He sent all his men below so that 
he and the helmsman, who was lying down " snug," were the only 
people on the silent deck. Teach, surrounded by his sullen and 
villainous gang, shrieked out the chorus of a sea song as the sloop 
drew near, and when she had drifted close enough he pelted her 
deck with grenadoes.^ 

At this moment the two vessels touched, whereupon Teach 
and his crew, with hideous yells and a great gleam of cutlass 
blades, leapt upon the sloop's deck. They leapt through the 
smoke with which the ship was still smothered, and out of the 
cloud the awful figure of the buccaneer emerged, making for 
Maynard. At the same time the men hidden in the sloop 
scrambled up from the hold, and the riot of the fight began. 

As Teach and Maynard met they both fired at each other 

• Case bottles filled with powder and slugs, and provided with a quick match. 



MEMOIRS OF EDWARD TEACH, MARINER. 213 

point blank. The lieutenant dodged, but the robber was hit in 
the face, and the blood was soon dripping from his beard, the ends 
of which were, as usual, tucked up over his ears. There was no 
time to fumble with pistols now. So they fought with cutlasses. 
Teach, spitting the blood out of his mouth, swore that he would 
hack Maynard's soul from his body ; but his opponent was too 
fine an adept with the sword to be easily disposed of It was k 
fearful duel : a trial of the robber's immense strength against the 
officer's deftness. 

They chased each other about the deck, stumbling across 
dead bodies, knocking down snarling men who, clutched together, 
were fighting with knives. Ever through the mirk could be seen 
the buccaneer's grinning teeth and evil eyes ; ever above the 
hubbub and scuffling rose his murderous war cry. Both were 
wounded, both breathless. 

At last Maynard, in defending himself from a terrific blow, had 
his sword blade broken off at the hilt. Now was the pirate's 
chance. He aimed a slash at Maynard. It fell short and only 
hacked a few of his fingers off, for as the blow fell one of the 
sloop's men brought his cutlass down upon the back of the 
buccaneer's red neck, making a horrible wound which might have 
been done by an executioner's axe. Teach turned upon him and 
cut him to the deck. 

For the moment the current of the fight changed. The decks 
were very slippery from blood. Teach kicked off his shoes so as 
to get a better hold of the planks. Half a dozen of the sloop's 
men were against him now. He stood with his back to the 
bulwarks, a scarcely human figure. Panting horribly, he roared 
like a maddened bull. His dripping cutlass still kept those he 
called dogs at bay. He had received twenty-five wounds, five of 
which were from bullets. Blood was streaming down his hairy 
chest. Blood clots dangled from his fantastic beard in place of 
the bows of ribbon. The muscles of his neck having been cut 
through his head fell forwards hideously, but there was still a 
defiant smile on his lips. 

At last he drew a pistol and was cocking it at arm's length. 



214 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

but before the trigger was drawn, and before a man touched him, 
his beast-like eyelids closed and he fell back on the railing, 
dead. 

His few remaining men dropped overboard and the little creek 
became still once more. Lieutenant Maynard cut off Teach's 
head (it was already nearly severed at the back) and hung it up 
on the " boltsprit end " of his sloop. With this strange ornament 
swinging from the bows, and with thirteen pirates safe in the hold, 
Maynard set sail for Bath Town in North Carolina. Here the 
thirteen were promptly hanged. 

The only one of Black Beard's men who escaped was Israel 
Hands, who was ashore at the time, nursing a pistol wound in his 
knee. 



XLII. 

A HARBOUR ENTRY. 

It is a romantic and even tragic entry, the entry into the lagoon- 
like harbour of San Juan. There are many San Juans in these 
seas, but this is San Juan Bautista, the capital of the island of 
Puerto Rico, The island was discovered by Columbus on his 
second voyage, and was colonised by the Spaniards with much 
murdering and savagery. Spanish it has remained, with unim- 
portant interruptions, until late years — until 1898, in fact, when it 
became a dependency of the United States of America. 

Saint John the Baptist is a walled town, old and weather- 
beaten, very massively fortified, and hoary with annals of rough 
fighting in which sakers and demi-culverins, fire-ships and pikes 
have borne stout parts. The entrance into the harbour from the 
open Atlantic is narrow and wild-looking. On one side, on a 
point of ragged land, is a Spanish fort, a pile of terrific and heart- 
less walls, yellow with age and streaked with black as if with 
tears. On the other side is a low, rocky island which is often 
hidden by drifting spray, the Isla de Cabras. Between the two 
is the eddying sea passage, where smooth-backed combers hurl 
themselves through, brushing their great shoulders against the 
slimy fortress wall, and then crashing upon the rocks beyond the 
glacis as well as upon the shore of the battered island. 

When the wind is northerly and the ocean swell high and 
arrogant the ship making for the haven is hurried breathless down 
the gap, with much rolling to and fro, as if a hand beneath the 
sea was lifting the keel. In taking this channel in heavy weather 
even a tourist steamer must feel that, just for one fine moment, 



2i6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

it is an object of romance. The thrill, however, dies away when 
the anchor is dropped, and the deck is boarded by postcard vendors 
and the owners of cabs. 

San Juan is as fine an example of a walled city as will be 
found among the islands or along the Spanish Main. Within the 
circuit of its formidable black masonry the town stands huddled, 
although of recent times the houses, with an assurance of security, 
have crept out boldly from beyond the fortifications and have 
settled themselves down in open suburbs. The town in reality 
occupies a narrow island separated from the mainland by a 
channel which, passing beneath the San Antonio bridge, winds 
into the harbour by Isla Grande and by Miraflores Bay. The 
sea margin of the island presents to the Atlantic a cliff of sinister 
rock, lOO feet high, surmounted always by the menacing black 
wall. 

The city is on a slope, for the land drops from the cliff 
summit to the level shore of the harbour. Thus of San Juan 
little is to be seen from the sea, save the ill-looking forts, the 
black wall, and a suspicious tower or two peeping above the battle- 
ments. But to the placid tree-encircled harbour, to the harbour 
of sunny creeks and silver shoals, the city opens its arms and its 
very heart. 

The veteran fort that stands at the harbour mouth, brooding 
over the swirling entry, is called El Morro. It was built, they say, 
in 1584, while the gaunt wall which surrounds the town was not 
completed until 1 771. Morro Castle, therefore, was well known 
to Drake and to that aristocratic pirate the Earl of Cumberland. 
There is no doubt but that it has been greatly strengthened since 
these two sturdy Englishmen mocked and defied it. It is now 
an immense fortress, with three tiers of batteries facing the sea, 
with spray-wetted platforms and sally-ports, under whose doors the 
sea creeps in at times of high tida Its horrible walls are made 
one with the dead cliff. There are so many loopholes in its front 
that the place seems more full of eyes than the head of the giant 
Argus. In each black, skull-like socket, where would be the pupil 
of a globe, is the muzzle of a gun, an iris of steel. 



A HARBOUR ENTRY. 217 

This San Juan, this very harbour mouth, comes into the scene 
of one of the most pathetic of the sea stories of England, the 
story of the last voyage of John Hawkins and Francis Drake. 

These great Elizabethan sailors, kinsmen and life-long friends, 
had followed the sea from boyhood. Ever famous as two of the 
most conspicuous figures in an age of heroic pioneering, the tale of 
their lives is one long saga of daring and adventure. None had 
done more than they to break the sea power of Spain, or to lay 
the foundations of Britain's position as mistress of the sea. Both 
had fought against the Armada in the memorable year of 1588 ; 
both had made themselves " so redoubtable to the Spaniards " that 
their very names were breathed with awe in the court of Philip ; 
both were possessed by a hate of Spain so fervid that it became 
little less than a tenet of religion. 

This last expedition was to some extent a voyage of revenge. 
The foul treachery of the Spaniards at San Juan d'Ulloa had 
never been forgotten, forgiven or effaced. More than that, 
Hawkins's only son, Richard, had been captured by the Spaniards, 
together with his ship Dainty. The lad was now lying, as his 
father believed, in some torture chamber of the Inquisition on the 
Spanish Main. The old man, in spite of his failing health and the 
need of a final spell of peace, could not rest in England. He was 
ever haunted by the picture of his beloved boy, the delight of his 
life, either utterly alone in a cramped cell or in a vaulted room 
wherein were a rack and hooded figures. He could hear the 
creaking of the wheels, the twang of the rope about the livid 
wrists as the lever moved through another notch. He could catch 
the gasping breath, the grinding of the teeth, and see the sweat 
streaming from the brow. Moreover in Plymouth was Judith, 
his son's young wife, and the sight of her anguish was beyond all 
bearing. So he went to Drake, his kinsman and old shipmate. 
" Would he go with him ? " " Go with him ! Yes, a thousand 
times ! " 

Thus the two got together a fleet, and sailed away from 
Plymouth on August 28, 1595, just two years after Richard 
Hawkins had been taken prisoner. They were both old and 



2i8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEE?. 

broken-down men, although Drake was only fifty-five and 
Hawkins sixty-three. They had a fine fleet of twenty-seven 
ships and a force of 2500 men and boys. No less than six 
vessels were ships of the Queen. Of these Drake commanded 
the Defiance, 500 tons, and Hawkins the Garland, 700 tons. 

In many a year had these two sailed out of Plymouth harbour 
bound for the West Indies or the Main. This was the last occasion 
of their going, the last time that either of them would see the 
coasts of Devon. As the familiar cliffs faded in the gloom they 
vanished for ever ; and we may be sure that the last figure they 
would see before the land grew dim would be Judith, praying to 
God that they may have good speed. 

The voyage was disastrous from the beginning to the end. 
The aged admiral, who was spending the last blood in his veins 
in the quest for his son, was a dying man. Drake, the intrepid 
fighter, the scourge of the seas, the West Indian Vanderdecken, 
had lost his cunning and his prestige. Spanish spies had gone 
ahead with news of their projects. 

The English had not been long at sea before a painful scene 
took place, at the council table, between the two old friends. 
They disagreed as to the policy of a forced landing on the 
Canaries. Drake's advice prevailed ; an invasion was attempted, 
but it failed utterly. 

Beaten off, they laid a course for the familiar Caribbees, made 
Domenica, and rested at anchor under the shelter of Marie Galante. 
Here befell another calamity. The hindmost ship of the fleet, 
the Francis, was taken by the Spaniards, and the crew sent as 
prisoners to Puerto Rico after the plans of the English had been 
extracted from the master by torture. It was Drake's intention 
now to sack San Juan of Puerto Rico, but it was not until 
November that they headed their ships northwards in search of 
a channel through the Virgin Islands. 

More than two entire months had passed away and nothing 
had been done. The time was long for a man whose days were 
numbered. One can picture the aged admiral as he leaned over 
the ship's side, looking for the land that was so slow in coming — 



A HARBOUR ENTRY. 219 

a fine figure of an old sea lion, although his hair and his trim 
moustache were white and his face furrowed, and although the 
hand that clutched the bulwarks was thin and nerveless. The 
goal he was destined never to behold. Culebra was passed on 
November 12, and on the same day, just at the hour of sundown, 
the easternmost point of Puerto Rico came in sight. John 
Hawkins was now rapidly nearing his end, and the last sound 
that would have fallen upon his dying ears was the cry of the 
man at the look-out, " Land ahead ! " ^ It was a fitting death, to 
die at sea amidst the scenes of his brilliant exploits, to die at the 
time of the setting of the sun, at the moment that the long-sought 
shore was sighted. 

In the meanwhile the Spaniards at San Juan were awaiting 
the coming of Drake and his ships. We have an account of his 
attack upon the town preserved in Spanish records of the time.^ 
The city was astir. The women and children were being hurried 
away to places of safety. They pattered over the bridge to 
the mainland, a fluttering, chattering cavalcade, in litters, on 
mules or asses, and on foot, carrying with them a jumble of 
household treasures, silks and cooking pots, bed linen and pet 
monkeys. 

Men were lining up in the streets, in the Plaza, and in the 
castle square. They mustered a force of 10,000, including 800 
mariners, and fifty horsemen with lance and buckler. On 
El Morro were mounted no less than twenty-seven "very good 
brass guns." The cathedral bell was tolling, for the bishop was 
about to offer Mass, and to preach a sermon to all who could 
be spared from the ramparts. Merchants were busy hiding 
treasure in vaults or under floors, and in holes dug in gardens by 
night. 

A ship called the Capitana de Tierra Firme^ and another 
belonging to Sefior Pedro Milanes, were sunk in the narrow entry 
to the port — an exciting spectacle, no doubt, for the gaping crowd 

' "At the easternmost end of St. John . . . Sir John Hawkins departed this life." 
Drake's Report. 

* Spanish Account of Drake at San Juan, Ptierto Rico. Hakluyt Society. 



220 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

at the foot of El Morro, since the sea runs strong in the passage 
and the scuttling of two great ships is no mean sight. 

On a certain Wednesday, at the break of day, the English 
fleet appeared on the eastern horizon, rising up spectre-like 
against the red glow of the dawn. Everyone rushed to the 
sea-wall and gazed eastwards, their faces lit by the enlarging light. 
The fleet came on very slowly, for the wind was faint. In the van 
was a single pinnace, with some small boats taking soundings. 
Then came, in solemn order, the six great galleons of the Queen, 
with the Defiance leading. Among the six was the Garland^ 
bearing in her state cabin the body of the admiral. After the 
Queen's galleons came the privateers, and then, on either wing as 
well as in the rear, the little pinnaces. 

The anxious silence was broken at last by the boom of 
a gun. It was fired from the Boqueron battery on the east point 
of the island, and was directed at the boats with the scouting 
parties. They cleared off nimbly, but the fleet advanced with 
sober deliberation, and cast anchor opposite to the harbour mouth. 

Drake loved to show his contempt of Spaniards at all times, 
but on this occasion the parade cost him dear, for in the evening 
as he was supping in his cabin on the Defiance, with ports open 
and the table ablaze with lights, a round shot from El Morro 
crashed through the ship's side, smashing his chair under him, and 
killing his friend, Sir Nicholas Clifford, on the spot. 

The next morning being Thursday and St. Clement's Day the 
English fleet, from whose guns not one single shot had been fired, 
were found to have moved westward to an anchorage near the 
Isla de Cabras, that spray-driven island over against the castle. 
This was mysterious and disconcerting, especially as small boats 
were hovering about the entry to the harbour busy with the lead. 
There were five of the enemy's ships in the haven, and it was 
Drake's intent to set fire to these, and having put them out of 
action, to attack the city from the harbour side. 

During the whole of Thursday there was no stir of life in the 
fleet, but at ten o'clock, when it was dead dark, twenty-five boats 
with muffled oars made for the harbour entry. They crept in 



A HARBOUR ENTRY. 221 

close to the rock, feeling their way to the place where the ships 
were lying. They set fire to their sterns, and in a moment 
San Juan was awake and in an uproar. 

As the flames mounted up the masts, shrouds and yards 
appeared through the smoke like the spars and rigging of 
phantom ships ; men were seen rushing to and fro on the flaming 
decks, or dropping out of port-holes. The fires lit up the English 
boats as they darted over the shining surface of the haven. In a 
second the " very good brass guns " on El Morro were lashing the 
water with shot and shell. The English cheered as they battered 
the ships with " fire potts " and bombs. The Spaniards replied 
with musketry and with stones picked up from the ballast. 

Some nine or ten of the English boats were sunk and the crews 
drowned, or shot down as they swam, or hacked to death as they 
clung to the channels of Spanish ships. One frigate, the Magdalena, 
was burnt to the water's edge ; many of her sailors died in the 
flames, others were killed by small shot from Drake's men. The 
captain, jumping overboard, swam through the glare and the 
crowd of boats to the frigate Sancta Ysabel, dodging many a 
cutlass cut at his head on the way. 

The fires on the other ships were put out. The fight lasted 
only for one hour, during which time the whole harbour and town 
were lit by the glare of flames, so that faces could be seen on the 
walls, while the air was rent by an incessant cannonade, by the 
patter of small arms, the crackling of burning planks and the 
yells of men. The attempt had failed. The British were driven 
off with the loss — so the Spaniards reckoned — of over 400 
men. 

When Friday came Drake was planning another attack. He 
would sail his galleons right into the port, into the desperate 
passage, and destroy the four remaining ships of the enemy with 
cannon shot. The Spaniards could hear the rattle of his capstans 
as the anchors came up to the chant of the men. The attacking 
ships worked up to windward, luffed up and came about, and then 
with the trade-wind on the port quarter, sailed under full canvas 
for the harbour mouth. 



222 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The Spaniards had that morning already sunk two more 
vessels in the entry, and as Drake swept down upon them they 
scuttled another in the fair-way, making five in all. The passage 
was now impossible, so the Defiance and her consorts as they 
neared the clifif put their helms hard-a-port, and ran silently down 
to their old quarters off the Isla de Cabras. It was " at vesper 
time " when they dropped anchor there. Drake, the invincible 
Drake, had been again repulsed. 

That very night, when it was so dark that none could see, the 
English fleet bore away — beaten. 

Before they left there was one duty to be done. By the gun- 
wale of the Garland lay an object sewn up in canvas, with a 
round shot secured at one end. It was lit by the light of a 
solitary lantern, the glimmer of which revealed also the figure of 
Drake standing bareheaded and with downcast eyes. The plank 
on which the strange bundle lay was tilted by trembling hands 
and the body of John Hawkins dropped into the everlasting sea. 
Thus did the two old shipmates part company. 



XLIII. 

THE MAN WITH A GLOVE IN HIS HAT, 

Three years after Drake's departure another Englishman looked 
in at San Juan of Puerto Rico. The visitor on this occasion was 
the Right Honourable the Earl of Cumberland, M.A. Cambridge, 
and pirate. He was the admiral of a large privateering ex- 
pedition which had sailed out of Plymouth harbour on March 6, 
1598. The fleet consisted of twenty ships, all of which had been 
provided at the admiral's own charges. The noble earl had 
given to his flagship the impressive name of the Scourge of Malice. 

After some gentle pirating by the way the fleet reached 
Domenica, where they rested so that the sailors might find 
" refreshing." This was in May. On June 6 Lord Cumberland — 
following deliberately, as it would seem, the course that Drake 
had taken — reached San Juan Bautista. Being entirely unex- 
pected by the Spaniards he crept up to the coast at night, and 
landed 600 men half a league to the east of the castle of 
El Morro. He landed them at a spot where the governor was 
confident that no body of men could make the shore ; yet his 
Excellency should by this time have known the British better. 

He approached the unconscious town along the level way 
where now rumble the electric tramcars. Dividing his force into 
two parties, he simultaneously rushed the town and attacked the 
fort at the first dawning of the day. He had caught the Spaniards 
unawares, and after two hours of wild street and drawbridge 
fighting San Juan was his. There were very few soldiers in the 
fort, as a strong force had been recently despatched to Cartagena, 
where an attack of the tiresome English was hourly expected. 

My Lord of Cumberland must have felt that the world was 
going well with him, for San Juan was rich and prosperous. 

\ 



224 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

After he had made a survey of the merchants' storehouses, of the 
ships in the haven, and of the back parlours of the money-lenders, 
he probably walked to that ragged point of the island where 
El Morro looks down upon the harbour entry. Knowing well the 
story of Drake's desperate assault he must have viewed this narrow 
stretch of water with some emotion, for he and the great captain 
had been friends. It is probable indeed that he had with him one 
of Drake's own seamen, one who had taken part in the actual 
fight in '95, and who could explain where the Spanish frigates lay, 
where his own boat had crept in, and show perhaps with some 
savageness the very spot where he received the cutlass wound 
which had left that ugly seam across his face. More than that, 
with his hairy arm outstretched, he would point to the westward, 
across the sea, to the place where the body of Sir John Hawkins 
had been committed to the deep. 

It is probable also that some of the wreckage of the fire-ships 
sunk in the entry would still be there to be seen. This long dark 
shape beneath the sun-lit comber was the hull of the Capitana : 
that mast and uprising poop belonged to Pedro Milanes' ship : 
that wreck with the ghostly deck-house door still swinging to and 
fro in the wash of the sea, must be the craft that was scuttled just 
as Drake bore down in the Defiance on that eventful Friday 
afternoon. 

The pirate peer had hoped to make San Juan a base from 
which he could conduct an extensive and profitable buccaneering 
business in the adjacent districts. Unhappily for this purpose the 
fever fell upon his men, and killed them in such numbers that his 
force was soon reduced to less than half its strength. Cumberland 
feared nothing that he could see, but this invisible horror filled 
him with a numbing dread. He saw the strong man dragged to 
the ground by unseen hands, his face become yellow as if from 
fear, his eyes glare from his head as if he beheld the vampire face 
to face, his fingers wandering to and fro as if in search of a clue, 
his voice toneless and unhuman, like the voice of a ghoul. 

His resolve was soon taken. With those who lived he hurried 
on board the ships and sought the wholesome sea, pressing for 



THE MAN WITH A GLOVE IN HIS HAT. 225 

home with the good assurance that the shadow of death could be 
out-distanced, and that his men were safe when once he was within 
the charmed circle of Plymouth Sound. He left Puerto Rico on 
August 14, and made the coast of England on September 16, 
without further adventure. 

Of the acts of this remarkable Cambridge graduate in San 
Juan, and of all that he did, and of the havoc he wrought, a full 
writing exists in the chronicles of one Samuel Champlain — 
a Frenchman with an English-sounding name.^ Champlain was 
merely an early tourist, inquisitive and fond of making boyish 
maps. He reached San Juan de Puerto Rico not very long after 
Lord Cumberland had left. He found the island "pretty 
agreeable," he says, but " the air very hot." From a tourist's point 
of view there was not much to be seen. The English had pillaged 
the town very thoroughly, had burnt most of the houses, had 
wrecked the fortress and thrown down the ramparts. Moreover 
they had taken away all the ships in the harbour to the number of 
twelve, as well as fifty pieces of artillery of cast iron. 

The English, together with the fever, had made the city so 
vilely unpleasant that the inhabitants had fled to the wilds 
Indeed, Champlain says that there were only four white people in 
the place. He probably met one of these as he walked up the 
ruined street from the quay, and had, as a sympathetic Frenchman, 
to listen to lamentations more acute and varied than those of 
Jeremiah. If the citizen was a merchant he would take the tourist 
into his ruined store and, with spread out arms, show him what 
the perfidious English had done, and ask him what he thought of 
it. As the two sat upon rifled chests, cursing the British, it is 
possible that Champlain and his host cheered themselves with a 
little brandy from an unravished hiding-place. They would then 
take a stroll round the ruins, hear tales of woe from the three other 
white people, and watch the wretched Indians at work repairing 
the ramparts, 

It only remains to speak of the personality of the man who 
wrought all this ill, George, Earl of Cumberland, was forty years 
* Samuel Champlaln's Foyqffe, 1 599-1 602, Hakluyt Society, 1859, 

Q 



226 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

old when he took San Juan. He was a peer of bold and romantic 
spirit, with a fine passion for adventure worthy of the picturesque 
days of Elizabeth. His early life is unkindly described as having 
been "irregular." He was a courtier, a gambler, a man of 
immense strength and courage, perfect in all knightly exercises, 
and a consistently faithless husband. At the age of twenty-eight 
the conviction came upon him that a corsair's life was the only 
one that gave scope to his yearnings and his ideals. He there- 
upon wandered to and fro over the sea for years as a knight- 
errant, or, according to the estimate of some, as a nautical Don 
Quixote. In the calling of a buccaneer he was successful beyond 
all reasonable deserts. He commanded a ship against the Spanish 
Armada. He was a Knight of the Garter. 

It is little to be wondered if this handsome, strong, and 
splendidly dressed dare-devil was in favour with Queen Elizabeth. 
" He wore her glove, set with diamonds, as a plume in his hat." 
So far as I am aware nothing is known of the pretty circum- 
stances which led to the bestowal of the glove, of the bold corsair's 
sighs or of his lady's graciousness. Certain it is that this soft 
thing which had once touched the warm fingers of his Queen 
became for life his crest and badge. One may be sure that he 
wore it when he led his men up to the walls of the city on that 
morning in June. It may be that for years in Puerto Rico some 
story was handed down to the children of how the great gate of 
San Juan was rushed by a giant Englishman wearing a lady's 
glove in his hat. 

There is a portrait of the earl in the National Portrait Gallery. 
It was painted in 1588, the year of the Armada, when he was 
thirty years of age. It shows a man with a fine vigorous 
face, a small moustache, a pointed beard, and long, curly brown 
hair. His armour and his dress are magnificent, while jewels of 
price hang about his neck. On his head is a white hat with 
plumes. In front of it is his lady's glove so folded as to show the 
claret-coloured velvet cuff. It is a dainty glove, bright with 
diamonds, and made to encircle none but a little wrist. It would 
not be ill matched, in sooth, when its fragile fingers were lying in 
the grip of the sailor's mighty hand. 



XLIV. 

THE SAN JUAN OF TO-DAY. 

San Juan of Puerto Rico is a Spanish city of dashing colours, 
very pleasant to see as it breaks into view when entering the 
harbour. The houses are packed together within the great 
black wall, there being but little green to relieve the pile of 
many-windowed, many-towered stucco and stone. The narrow 
streets are paved and clean, and, although a little oppressive, are 
refreshed at every turn by glimpses of the sea. The houses, 
mostly flat-roofed, are lavish in balconies and sun-shutters, in 
barred windows, and in lazy courtyards full of shadows. Carts 
drawn by blas6-looking oxen creak and groan by the side of 
electric tramcars, while mules, covered with the dust of far-off 
roads, are constantly plodding through the city gates. There are, 
in the town, certain much-painted churches, some of great age, 
a central plaza, public buildings too dazzling to look upon when 
the sun is bright, infinite taverns to meet the infinite leisure of the 
Spaniard, and many curious by-lanes reminiscent of Madrid. 

The folk in the street are, as to their complexions, for the most 
part white, yellow or cinnamon brown. Among them are hand- 
some men and beautiful women, with a still greater number who 
are mean and undersized, and not free from suspicions of 
degeneracy. There are divers old Spanish families in the island, 
some of whom may have " come over " with Ponce de Leon. 
They have preserved, through long centuries and to their own 
detriment, the hauteur and the exclusiveness of a conquering 
people. In spite of 1898, San Juan is still Spanish to the core. 

The negro is not much in evidence except with the ox-waggon 
or the mules, or squatting by baskets of fruit exposed along the 



228 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

wayside. Everywhere are to be seen proofs of the excellence of 
the American administration, with signs of the times, which show 
that no mean part of the trade of the city is falling into American 
hands. 

At the east end of the town, and by the edge of the sea, is the 
mighty fort of San Cristobal, built in 177 1. It covers an immense 
area, being indeed in itself a small walled city. That side which 
looks seaward shows a relentless wall at whose foot break, with 
sounds of thunder, the rollers from the Atlantic. Here and there 
a stone sentry box juts out from the curtain — a human feature 
among this mountainous heap of masonry. 

About the fortress is a great fosse with a heavy scarp on either 
side. Beyond the fosse are confusing outworks — a tenaille or two in 
the enceinte ditch, with possibly a caponiere across the same. All 
the awe-inspiring and amazing features of a huge stronghold are 
here displayed — bastions, domed magazines, mysterious alleys, 
precipices of stone, ravines of masonry, paved platforms, repellent 
doorways. 

When Fort Cristobal was built at the end of the eighteenth 
century it was a wonder for men to see. Here at last was the place 
impregnable. Here was the challenge, the gauntlet thrown down 
by the Spaniard to the sea rover whatever his breed. There is 
about the citadel even now all the arrogance of the strong man 
armed, the hush of a place that deals with death, the cruelty of 
cunning walls that bristle with means to kill. Fort Cristobal with 
its boastful parade of the resources of war might be a temple to 
the God of Battle, a palace of Bellona. 

Possibly the most haunting features of the great fort are the 
dungeons. Tales of the Middle Ages would lead one to expect 
that the prison doors would be approached by way of a dark and 
winding stair, or by vaulted passages muffled with mould. In 
this particular stronghold, however, there is a certain mockery 
about the entry to the torture chambers. 

In a little square, between two high walls, is a plat of grass. 
On one side the square is open to the sea, being indeed bounded 
by a parapet where an idler might lean over and watch the waves. 
Among the grass of this monastic lawn are many sensitive plants, 



THE SAN JUAN OF TO-DAY. 229 

as well as a purple flower very like a violet. At the foot of one of 
the walls which shut in this quiet close is a black gap, low and 
narrow, like the opening into a den. It is so low that one has to 
stoop to enter it. 

It leads into a downward-sloping passage which makes its way 
under the mass of the fortifications. The tunnel stretches far into 
the depths, until the comforting gleam of light at the entrance 
fades to a small disc of haze and then vanishes entirely, leaving 
the gloom trackless. By the time the dungeons are reached the 
air is already suffocating, while there is a sense of being crushed 
under an avalanche of rock. 

The passage leads to some six cells, mere cramped recesses 
lined with stone. Each shows a niche in the wall subtly contrived 
to take a human body if bent up in the sitting position. There is 
a groove cut in the roof to take the nape of the neck, the chin 
would be pressed almost to the knees, while an iron bar bolted 
across the chest would keep the victim still, as well as hold up the 
limp body when death had made it helpless. 

No light of day can ever reach these catacombs. No sound 
can penetrate so far. Such air as finds its way thus deep into the 
earth is spent and tainted. Here is it possible to realise the 
circumstances of being buried alive, to apprehend the crushing to 
death by inches, the struggle to lift a mountain of stone, the 
agony of being throttled, the eternal dark, the sense of being 
abandoned. Here the trapped wretch would be pinned, gasping 
like a drowning man, crumpled up like a hunchback, until he 
shrivelled to a thing of leather, and in the end to a mere knot of 
contorted bones. 

Upon these dungeons have been expended infinite labour, 
complacent skill, cool precision, and diabolical ingenuity. They 
will remain for ever as a monument of what is possible to be 
conceived in the bitter depths of human cruelty and hate. To 
retraverse the back-breaking passage from the charnel-house to 
the open air is to awaken from a fearsome dream. It was a 
memorable relief to see once more the sun on the plat of grass, to 
stand erect and breathe, and to hear at the foot of the rocks the 
reassuring sound of the sea. 



230 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XLV. 

THE WHITE HOUSE. 

The walled capital of Puerto Rico will be for ever associated 
with the life and times of that most romantic adventurer, 
Juan Ponce de Leon. This picturesque Castilian was a soldier 
of fortune, who had already served in many campaigns before he 
embarked with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. 

Ponce de Leon in due course settled in the turbulent, murder- 
ridden island of Espanola, where he became lieutenant to the 
governor, and where he perfected himself in the arts of Indian 
warfare. As a hunter and slayer of Indians he acquired 
imperishable fame. In 1508 he went with an armed force to 
Puerto Rico, found the island peopled by the gentle Arawaks, and 
proceeded, in the Spanish fashion, to wipe them off the face of the 
earth. They died very hard ; but left no traces of themselves 
except in records of native risings, of Spanish houses in flames, 
and of white men stumbled upon in woods, dead and mutilated. 
In 1509 Ponce de Leon was appointed Governor of Puerto Rico, 
where, two years later, he founded the city of San Juan Bautista. 
Here he lived in the Casa Blanca, the White House, which he 
built for himself by the margin of the harbour. 

Time was beginning to tell upon the intrepid soldier. Three 
years of alert fighting in a treacherous country had sapped his 
vigour ; three years of the tropics had damped that fiery and 
disdainful spirit which had made him a leader of men. Although 
he had but reached the age of fifty-two he was already an old man. 
He who had been the imperious ruler was losing his grip upon the 
neck of affairs. He who had feared nothing was now haunted by 
a hundred dreads. The man whose voice had been the voice of 



THE WHITE HOUSE. 231 

a god, had come to be mocked by underlings, and defied by 
creatures he had lifted from the dust. Like the Hon who was 
once king of the forest, but who had become aged and toothless, 
he could now only stand with his back against a rock and snarl 
at those who essayed to snap at him. 

If there could return once more the strength and daring of 
bygone days ! If it were but possible to feel again in his veins 
the stirring pulse of youth ! What a dream would that be to 
gloat over, whenever he had turned from the council chamber 
thwarted, and sore at heart ! 

As he fretted within the walls of Casa Blanca, pondering these 
things, he heard some story of an island where was a spring of 
water, of which all who drank had restored to them the dash and 
vigour of youth. Here then it seemed was the substance of his 
longing. At all hazards he would search the world for this 
fountain of life and find it. The very thought filled his mind 
with warm fancies and extravagant imaginings. He learned that 
the spring was in an island called Bimini, away to the north. 
With the haste of one whose days are few, he fitted out three 
ships and sailed from Puerto Rico on March 3, 15 12, taking his 
departure from San German on the west of the island. 

Now Bimini was to be found — so the soothsayer affirmed — 
among the Bahamas. It was an unlikely spot for the Fountain of 
Youth, inasmuch as the Bahamas are a prosaic group of sandstone 
islets and rocks, poor of soil and but thinly wooded. Some are 
indeed mere wastes of scrub, given over to sea birds and turtles. 
They are dangerous of approach, which was a good omen in the 
eyes of the pursuer of youth, for it may be supposed that Bimini 
the precious would be guarded by dragons in the form of coral 
reefs and death-scattering shoals. 

Had Ponce de Leon possessed the advantage of consulting the 
Admiralty "West India Pilot" he would have found it reported 
(in volume ii.) that among the Bahamas " good water is rather 
scarce." According to the same authority the Bimini Inlands, 
two in number, are mean and sandy, being " covered with small 
wood to the height of about forty feet." On the north island " is 



232 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

a small settlement and a resident magistrate ; and vessels in 
distress may obtain water and supplies sufficient for the moment." 
It is not stated that the water has any medicinal or magic 
properties. 

In the course of his search the expectant Juan incidentally 
discovered Florida. He called it Florida, it would seem, because 
his mind was full of thoughts of the budding flowers that grace the 
boy and girl time of the year. 

He landed at every island or cay he came upon, and as they 
number some hundreds in this region he was well engaged. He 
drank of every spring, pool or puddle that the islands could 
muster. During the course of his experiments on this spa-hunting 
quest he must have drunk brackish water, dirty water as well as 
water that made him sick. 

Still there was hope in every draught. He would fill his cup 
at the last discovered spring, would gaze at it with the expectancy 
of a toper reviewing a precious wine, would gulp it down, and then, 
drawing himself erect and squaring his shoulders, would wait for 
that glow in the veins and that tightening of the muscles which 
would tell that he had reached the fountain that made all men 
young. Lack of information as to the therapeutics of the desired 
beverage would involve some uncertainty as to how long it would 
take for the dose to act. The miracle might work when he was 
deep in sleep ! Filled with this hope he would spring from his 
couch in the morning and rush to the mirror, hoping to find 
reflected there the ruddy cheeks of a lad with down upon his lips, 
and a merry gleam in his eyes. Alas ! he met instead with the 
old, familiar, shrunken visage, the lined brow, the wearied eyes, 
the grey tuft of scanty beard. 

Every native that the adventurer encountered was questioned 
as to the Fountain of Life, although he might as well have been 
interrogated as to the Binomial Theorem, Every man with whom 
the Castilian could obtain speech was pressed by the ever repeated, 
piteous demand, "Tell me the way to Bimini," It was like 
a child at Christmas time, wandering about with an empty 
stocking and asking everyone if he had met Santa Claus. 



THE WHITE HOUSE. 233 

On one small island, on a certain day in his journeying, he 
found an aged Indian woman. She was the sole human being 
on the desolate spot. It is probable that she had been left there 
to die, or had been turned adrift in a canoe without paddles, and 
had found herself cast upon this particular shore. It may not be 
too much to suppose that she was the scold and virago of her 
native village, an old harridan of whose tongue everybody went in 
dread, yet whom no one dared to murder outright. Perhaps she 
was carried off one night with her head in a bag, squealing, 
scratching, and fire-spitting, to be dropped into a canoe when the 
tide was running strong. 

The stately Ponce de Leon asked her, of course, if she knew 
Bimini and the Spring of Eternal Youth. She replied, with the 
readiness of Sapphira, that she knew both the island and the 
fountain well. She was probably not called upon to explain why 
she herself had not drunk of its water, or why, if she had so drunk, 
the result was so exceedingly discouraging. She was rowed off to 
the ship as a pearl of great price, to become her saviour's guide, 
philosopher and friend. 

So the two started off together on the great quest, a curious 
couple in very truth, the spotless knight, the Sir Galahad of the 
West, and this toothless, unsavoury old beldame, who jabbered 
and chattered all day long, and who was constantly dragged out 
of the hold (where she had been put for peace) to see if this island 
or that was the real Isle of the Blessed. How the deluded soldier 
would scan her wrinkled face each time as she looked shoreward ; 
how he would gaze into her cunning eyes for the light of 
recognition ; with what impatience would he wait for the first 
words that dropped from her mumbling lips ! 

Ponce de Leon and the dirty old woman travelled together for 
many months, but no fountain was come upon. She became 
more jovial and less bony, while he only felt himself weighed 
down more heavily by age as each day passed. After much 
travail he returned to Puerto Rico and to the Casa Blanca'with its 
restful garden, His faith in the ancient crone, who had been so 
long his shipmate, never faltered. So deep was he under her spell 



234 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

that he sent her off again upon the high seas with his captain, 
Juan Perez, to continue the search for this precious fountain which 
all the time was running recklessly to waste. 

The grimy old lady must have become quite a mariner, quite 
an authority on the Bahamas, as well as a finished expert in the 
art of lying. After many months of absence, Juan Perez dropped 
his anchor one day in the harbour over against the White House, 
and, rowing ashore, came to tell his master, with downcast face 
and hat in hand, that the quest had failed. What became of that 
ancient mariner, the lady pilot, is not known. I expect that 
Juan Perez, maddened by her babble and sick of her story-telling, 
dropped her once more into a canoe without paddles and reported 
her — on his return — as having flown away upon a witch's broom- 
stick. 

As to Ponce de Leon, his vanity and restlessness, together 
with the flattery of his friends, brought him to his end. After 
some leisured years he felt that he must needs display once more 
to the admiring world his long latent talents as a fighter of 
Indians. So with nothing less than a fleet from Spain he 
proceeded to rid the islands and the adjacent seas of the 
obnoxious native. He commenced his operations at Guadaloupe, 
was received not by gentle Arawaks but by a teeth-gnashing 
company of lusty Caribs, who, without more ado, ambushed and 
killed most of his men. 

The great Indian fighter had failed. He was beaten in his 
very first essay by a pack of naked cannibals ; so, sick at heart, he 
returned ingloriously once more to the Casa Blanca. Here he 
was content to stay and build castles in the air, and strut the part 
of governor, a peevish, testy, conceited old man, whom folk were 
disposed to humour compassionately. 

In 1 52 1— by which time he was sixty-one and a tiresome old 
dodderer — he must needs go forth to conquer Florida, and by this 
exploit eclipse the deeds of Cortes and Pizarro. He made a 
landing on the coast, with fine bluster and ceremony no doubt, 
but was driven back to his boats by the Indians, who in the 
process wounded the crazy old soldier in the thigh. This little 



THE WHITE HOUSE. 235 

rebuff, involving, as it did, much puffing and panting, left him 
resolved to go home again and resume his gardening. He had 
had in one day enough of empire-making, being, moreover, fully 
satisfied that Pizarro was not a man he was disposed to flatter by 
further imitation. 

Poor soul ! his ship reached only so far as Cuba, where he was 
carried ashore and where he died. 

The visitor to San Juan will readily find the Casa Blanca. It 
stands on a bluff overlooking the harbour, a great white, rambling 
house, which is still a place of authority, for it is the Headquarters 
of the United States Army. Of the white house that Ponce de 
Leon knew and loved, it is safe to say that no stone exists. But 
the garden is there with its picturesque slopes, its nodding palms, 
and its glorious outlook across the shining lagoon. Well might 
the man who dallied in this pleasance sigh for eternal youth, so 
that the enchanting scene should never fade, or become out of tune 
or unappreciated. 

Surrounding the garden is a most noticeable wall, white from 
end to end, very ancient and very curiously crenellated. It has 
about it so wizen a look, that one is tempted to believe that it was 
built by him who sought the Fountain of Youth, and that a 
memory of this very garden, with its white wall, survived the 
medley of arms and men that crowded upon his brain as he lay 
dying in Cuba. 



236 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



XLVI. 

MONA THE PROTESTANT. 

On the way from San Juan de Puerto Rico to San Domingo the 
steamer passes close to Mona Island. This remarkable piece of 
land appears to have planted itself in these seas as a protest 
against the luxury, the extravagance, and the general profligacy of 
the whole gathering of West Indian Islands. These islands are 
characterised — as none can gainsay — by a recklessness of out- 
line, by a lavish display of hills and peaks, by frivolous capes and 
coves, and by a meretricious flaunting of garish colours. 

Mona the Protestant stands alone among this giddy company, 
a St. John crying in the wilderness. Solemn and austere, it 
would claim to be, in a careless land, a pattern of righteousness. 
Its surface is an absolutely dead, monotonous, self-mortifying 
level. Nothing so gay even as a hillock disturbs its surface. No 
suspicion of green, no trace of colour, defiles its sanctimonious 
outline. From point to point it is one relentless monastic grey. 
As a rebuke to such furbelows as creeks and promontories, its 
chaste circuit is marked by an undeviating, sour cliff, as numb as 
a prison wall. 

This sea-girt recluse appears, indeed, to have stripped itself of 
every possible feature that could make an island joyous. Viewed 
from a distance it looks like a slab of dull paving stone resting on 
the ocean. As even the severest ascetic has probably some 
hidden weaknesses, so Mona is said to present certain pits and 
holes on its solemn surface, where are surreptitious scrub and even 
patches of grass. It nourishes in its shrunken bosom, moreover, 
goats, hogs, and tortoises, and has so far yielded to the 
temptations of the mercenary world as to harbour a German 



MONA THE PROTESTANT. 237 

company i;pho dig foul-smelling guano within its melancholy 
confines. 

It boasts also of a tortured rock which is in a state of eternal 
penance, for it is balanced on the brink of a precipice where it 
appears to be ever on the point of toppling over. This 
purgatorial stone is called " Caigo-o-no-caigo " (" Shall I fall or 
not ? ") Across the Mona passage, to which this island gives its 
name, stands Haiti, to the chief city of which — San Domingo — 
the steamer is bound. 



238 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



XLVII. 

THE ISLAND OF MISRULE. 

The island of Haiti, or Espafiola, was discovered by Columbus, 
during his first voyage, on December 6, 1492. He was fascinated 
with it from the moment he came in sight of its shores. He 
found the climate to be like May in Cordova, and the hills and 
valleys to rival in loveliness those of Castile, so he called the 
island Espanola. It was destined to be associated in his career 
with little more than disappointment and misfortune. 

He made the north coast of the island, and on Christmas Eve 
sailed into Acul Bay. Near here his own ship, the famous 
Santa Maria^ went haplessly ashore and became a total wreck. 
Somewhere under the sands about this bay are still lying the 
brown keel and bilge timbers of this great three-masted galleon 
of 100 tons in which the discovery of the New World was 
made. 

Among the crew of the Santa Maria were an Englishman 
named Tallarte, or Allard, and an Irishman who is entered on the 
ship's books as William of Galway. How these two adventurous 
mariners came to find themselves at Palos, whence the expedition 
sailed, is unknown. They probably enlisted for the venture as 
a means of escaping the rigours of a Spanish gaol. Anyhow 
Columbus when he returned home the first time left Allard and 
William behind on Haiti with forty others. They were enjoined 
to collect gold and to form a colony at a spot named La Navidad, 
where a fort had been already built. This was in January 1493. 

Now Columbus did not return to Espanola until November 
1493, and in the meanwhile no tidings had reached him of this 
first city of his founding. He approached La Navidad on his 

















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THE ISLAND OF MISRULE. 239 

second coming with the most eager interest. So impatient was he 
that he sent a boat ashore with an exploring party as soon as he 
came in touch with the coast. On the sands of a lonely river, 
fringed no doubt by the green sea grape, the party landed. The 
first noticeable things they happened upon were two dead bodies, 
one with a rope round its neck and the other with a rope round its 
feet They were two of the crew of the Santa Maria. In such 
wise was the admiral welcomed to his new possessions in the 
earthly paradise. 

Columbus hurried on to La Navidad and reached the haven at 
nightfall. There was no light to be seen on the shore. He fired 
off two guns, expecting still a joyous response from the beach, 
2, feu dejoie from the fort, bonfires, Spanish cheers, and a crowd of 
beaming men in hurriedly paddled canoes, tearing across the bay. 
No answer came. La Navidad was silent. 

He landed at daybreak with vehement anxiety. No boat 
could be seen in the harbour. There was not a soul on the beach. 
As he jumped ashore the land crabs scuttled away to their holes. 
He made for the fort. It was deserted and in ashes, while 
among the cinders, as he kicked them to and fro, were bleached 
bones and fragments of clothing. In some native huts in the 
thicket he found a Moorish mantle, an anchor, and a dead man's 
head wrapped up in a basket. 

The truth came out at last. La Navidad had ceased to be. 
Every one of the company of forty-two was dead, including 
Allard of England and William of Galway. The colonists, as 
soon as the admiral's ship was out of sight, had abandoned 
themselves to every kind of excess. The robbing of the Indians 
and the seizing of their wives and daughters became favourite 
pastimes. Murder followed incidentally. Some of the settlers died 
of their debaucheries ; others succumbed to disease ; while those 
who remained were butchered by the infuriated natives. 

Thus the attempt to fill the coffers of Spain with gold, to 
found a city, and to diffuse the blessings of civilisation among 
a godless and benighted people came to piteous failure. At 
La Navidad were reaped the first fruits of Spain's "glorious 



240 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

conquest and discovery." The most that could be claimed in the 
matter of glory was that six poor heathens, taken to Spain by 
Columbus on his first leaving Espanola, had been received, 
through baptism, into the Holy Faith, and had so secured " the 
safety of their souls." 

Columbus the dreamer — quite undismayed by the disaster at 
La Navidad — sailed eastwards along the coast, and established 
another city, which he called Ysabel after that lady with the rare 
blue eyes, her Most Catholic Majesty the Queen of Castile. This 
was in December 1493. The city was to become one of the 
marvels of the world. It was to outshine all the glories of Cathay. 
It was to dominate a country more favoured than the golden 
Chersonese, more full of riches than the plains of Ophir ; for this 
was the veritable land of Havilah, of which it had been truly said 
" and the gold of that land is good." 

The city of Ysabel never rose beyond a poor patch of mud and 
wattle huts, with perhaps a stone fort and a pretence at a quay. 
The hidalgo who had sailed with Columbus as a conqueror of 
strange lands and a founder of cities, was pictured by his friends 
in Seville as strutting along a causeway in Ysabel, paved with 
gold, attended by cringing Indians who carried before him baskets 
full of precious stones and incredible spices. In reality the 
famished aristocrat, sick with fever, was probably sitting on a box 
full of rotten stores, his silk doublet in rags, his hose in holes, 
his feet well nigh shoeless. He was pricking patterns with his 
sword in the fetid mud which made up the only street of the City 
of Despair, wondering if there was any slum in Spain so pitiable 
and so comfortless. 

Ysabel, the long forgotten, is now buried beneath the jungle. 
" Nothing remains to point out its exact locality but the ruins of 
a single pillar almost hid among the bushes near the beach." ^ 

Finally Columbus, hearing of gold in the south of the island, 
established the town of San Domingo at the mouth of the Ozama 
River. The town flourished, waxing rich and very famous, and 
exists to this day as the chief city of the island. 

^ JVesi India Pilot, vol. ii. page 271 ; London, 1899. 



THE ISLAND OF MISRULE. 241 

Spanish rule in the beautiful island of Espanola was terrible 
beyond all thinking. The whole native population was exter- 
minated, as has been already detailed (page 171). "If there be 
any powers of hell, they stalked at large through the forests and 
valleys of Espanola. Lust and bloody cruelty, of a kind not merely 
indescribable but unrealisable by sane men and women, drenched 
the once happy island with anguish and terror. And in payment 
for it the Spaniards undertook to teach the heathen the Christian 
religion. ... In the twelve years since the discovery of Columbus, 
between half a million and a million natives perished ; and as the 
Spanish colonisation spread afterwards from island to island, and 
the banner of civilisation and Christianity was borne farther 
abroad throughout the Indies, the same hideous process was 
continued. In Cuba, in Jamaica, throughout the Antilles, the 
cross and the sword, the whip-lash and the Gospel, advanced 
together ; wherever the Host was consecrated, hideous cries of 
agony and suffering broke forth ; until happily, in the fulness of 
time, the dire business was complete, and the whole of the people 
who had inhabited this garden of the world were exterminated, 
and their blood and race wiped from the face of the earth." ^ 

In 1505 negro slaves were introduced into Espanola. It was 
a memorable occasion ; the squalid beginning of a terrible end. 
The event itself was nothing more than the landing of a company 
of black men and women on the beach. They could hardly crawl 
out of the boats, so crippled were they from having been cramped 
for weeks in a putrid hold. Their very bodies were indented with 
the marks of the planks. Huddled together like frightened 
animals, they cowered on the sands, muttering miserably as they 
whisked the flies from the sores left by the last slash of the whip. 
Some would happily be dying ; all would be famished for want of 
food ; all wide-eyed with wonder and alarm. 

In this poor fashion there rose upon the horizon of Espafiola 
a small black cloud, no larger than a man's hand. It was a cloud 
that grew ever wider, rounder and darker, a cloud in whose hollows 

' Christopher Columbus, by Filson Young, vol. ii. pages 230 and 233 : London, 1906. 

R 



242 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

was the rumble of thunder. It grew, until at last it covered the 
bright island and buried it in night. 

By the time of the French Revolution there were some 500,000 
black slaves in Haiti. By this period, as the outcome of exuberant 
bloodshed, the west part of the island (that now known as Haiti) 
had passed into the hands of France, while Spain held still the 
eastern portion — the present territory of Santo Domingo. With 
the Revolution slavery was abolished, and in 1794 the National 
Assembly of France — with little knowledge of what they were 
doing — proclaimed the equality of all citizens in the island, 
irrespective of colour. Then the great thunder cloud burst, and 
there began a war between the blacks and the whites which for 
ferocity and diabolical viciousness remains without an equal in 
the world's history. 

The blacks had centuries of cruelty and oppression to wipe 
out, since the day when the first boat-load of negroes had landed. 
No quarter was thought of on either side. Villages and crops 
were committed to the flames. Captives were burned alive. 
Wholesale massacre was the order of the day. If the negroes 
were guilty of hideous atrocities on white women, the French, on 
their part, hunted fugitives with Cuban bloodhounds and spared 
neither the aged nor the children. 

The blacks were led by the famous Toussaint Breda, by him 
who was known as " L'ouverture " — the way of escape. It was 
through him, as through a bright portal, that the oppressed hoped 
to gain freedom and peace. He had been first a slave, then 
a coachman, and finally the general of the revolutionary forces. 
A fearless as well as a brilliant man, he was finally captured by 
treachery and died in a dungeon in France. 

After him came the demon Dessalines, who, when he had 
cleared the island of the French, caused himself to be crowned as 
Emperor of Haiti under the title of Jacques I. His reign, marked 
as it was by extraordinary debaucheries, was very short ; for after 
he had been two years upon the throne he was happily assassi- 
nated. This was in 1806. 

The blacks in their war with the French had, however, on their 



THE ISLAND OF MISRULE. 243 

side a more powerful ally than either Toussaint or Dessalines. 
The Yellow Death fought on the side of the slave, for it is esti- 
mated that no less than 26,000 of the French army perished of the 
fever. 

To Dessalines succeeded Christophe, one of the most ludicrous 
figures in modern history. He was a mulatto slave who took 
upon himself the title of Henri I. He created a copious black 
aristocracy, whereby the waterside porter became a duke, and 
the footman a marquis. He drew up a code of laws, the Code 
Henri, in imitation of the Code Napoleon. His court was as 
gorgeous as the court in an opera bouffe. More than that, he built 
the palace of Sans Souci, an unbelievable edifice worthy of the 
" Arabian Nights." The ruins of this fantastic edifice still crown 
certain gracious heights near Cap Haytien. Henri I. did one 
wise thing: he shot himself after a burlesque reign of some 
thirteen years. 

The subsequent history of the island is concerned largely with 
disorder and violence, with revolutions, pillage and bankruptcy, 
with the pulling down of one ruler or the suicide of another. 

Espafiola is now divided into the Black Republic of Haiti and 
the Mulatto Republic of Santo Domingo. Of the former Froude 
gives this account in his work on "The English in the West Indies." 
" They speak French still ; they are nominally Catholics still ; and 
the tags and rags of the gold lace of French civilisation continue 
to cling about their institutions. But in the heart of them has 
revived the old idolatry of the Gold Coast, and in the villages of 
the interior, where they are out of sight and can follow their 
instincts, they sacrifice children in the serpent's honour after the 
manner of their forefathers." 



244 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



XLVni. 

A CITY OUT AT ELBOWS. 

The city of San Domingo lies on the south side of Espafiola, 
the same being a gracious-looking island, mountainous and green. 
The city stands upon a mud-coloured cliff at the mouth of a small 
river. The ship anchors at a cautious distance, and as she rolls 
to the great " swell and scend of the sea " which is met with in 
the bay it is possible to take a view of the oldest existing settle- 
ment in the New World, of "the brave city of San Domingo," 
which was founded by Columbus 410 years ago. 

Every foot of ground in and about the capital has some 
memorable interest. There on the right, for instance, the river 
comes forth to the sea by way of a ravine like that at the mouth 
of the Dart in Devonshire. On the shore of that stream Hawkins 
in 1562 bartered slaves for gold dust and spices — a notable piece 
of business, for it was the first traffic of the English in West 
Indian, waters. A certain object on that river bank caught the 
eye of Francisco de Bobadilla, when he came from Europe to 
inquire into the alleged misconduct of Columbus. The object 
was a gibbet, from which the bodies of several Spaniards were 
hanging, and was to him a sign that Spain was making progress. 
Away to the west, where the cliff is low, is the beach upon which 
Drake landed his men when he made his famous assault on the 
city. 

It was about " the time of lauds," as the Spaniards would have 
said, that we anchored off the capital. The eastern sun fell full 
upon the town, lighting up the great wall of defence that crowns 
the southern cliff and encloses the city all the way round by the 



A CITY OUT AT ELBOWS. 245 

north. At one spot, where there was a gap in the wall, it was 
possible to look down a straight street, to see the long shadows 
thrown across the road, and the just-awakened townfolk moving 
dully about. 

Within the city wall is a medley of buildings and huts, of 
palm trees and banana fans, of house-fronts that look like squares 
of white or yellow cardboard, with here and there a black buttress 
or a frayed parapet. Above the heap of roofs there rise into the 
sun magnificent domes of brown masonry, cupolas, a lofty gable 
in grey that may belong to a palace, the tower of a church, the 
dense gi^een of trees. 

Those who would land at San Domingo must row ashore in 
small boats, and make for a quay some little way up the river. 
This river entry to the town is most romantic and picturesque 
On the headland, at the very mouth, is an ancient castle with 
heavy outworks, which would seem to be built of blood-coloured 
stones. This is the castle of Homenaje, a fortress with which 
Drake had dealings. It was probably built at the same time as 
the city walls, viz. in 1509. It is a wizened, rascally-looking, old 
place, whose seaward defences are as jagged as the cliff they 
spring from. Capping the stronghold is a great square tower, 
almost windowless, but brave with battlements of a very defiant 
type. It has at one angle a staircase tower, while below is a 
paved platform heavily embrasured — ^just such a one as might 
have been visited by the ghost that Hamlet saw. Creepers and 
green bushes are scaling the outworks from the sea-front, and 
seem likely, in course of years, to take the aged donjon by gentle 
assault. 

The river bank beyond the castle is steep with cliff and wall. 
By the water's edge is a contented stretch of plantains and low 
trees. On the summit of the wall are ancient houses. Some 
have balconies that overhang the stream ; others boast of turrets, 
fragments of terraces, water-gates where grandees once lingered, 
but which are now mere portals for filth. 

The wall that defied Drake and so many other marauders still 
encircles the city. It is not less than eight feet thick in places, is 



246 THE CRADLE OF THE DEER 

of imposing height, and is strengthened by bastions at intervals. 
There are still on the western front the gates through which the 
British entered when they seized the city in 1585. Ruin more 
or less disastrous has befallen the wall along its whole traverse, 
although its scars and seams are hidden by trailing green. Now 
is it put to various base uses, being convenient to throw rubbish 
over, to shelter midden heaps, as well as form a backing for a 
horde of parasitic hovels and evil-smelling sheds. 

The entrance to the city is through the River Gate, a noble 
structure of stone, with classic pillars on either side of it, well 
daubed with the red and green programmes of music halls. 

The town itself affords a spectacle of bygone magnificence 
and present squalor. The pride of San Domingo, once " the city 
of glorious fame," has fallen into sordid depths. Its superb 
buildings are left to crumble and decay. It has no past to revere, 
no prestige to maintain. It has indeed exchanged " old lamps for 
new," the carved stone city of mediseval Spain for the stuccoed 
town of the tawdry builder. 

The main streets of San Domingo smell ; the small streets 
stink. Rubbish is thrown into the road and left there to ferment 
and stew in the sun. The chief thoroughfare in the city is a way 
of ruts, pits, and trenches, having a bed not unlike that of a 
mountain torrent. Electric wires are slung along it on rough, 
unsteady poles straight from the backwoods, while a few 
dangling strands here and there seem to cause no uneasiness. In 
places on the side paths are fragments of pavement, with intervals 
of well-trampled mud, inlaid with castaway paper and banana 
skins. The number of gambling rooms and of brazen-faced 
taverns along the way give the High Street an air of 
unembarrassed dissipation which would have pleased the early 
buccaneer. 

The folk in the street are, for the most part, mulattoes, with 
an admixture of pure negroes, and of white men of doubtful 
whiteness. They are, on the whole, a picturesque people, not 
always of pleasing countenance, it is true, but with a certain 
theatrical air about them which is encouraged by the broad- 



A CITY OUT AT ELBOWS. 247 

brimmed sombrero, by silk sashes worn as belts, by dark eyes and 
wild black hair. The least attractive of the men are represented 
by certain bliack soldiers in butcher-blue blouses. They slouch 
about the streets with lethargic insolence, and serve to demon- 
strate to what depths even loafing may sink when the loafer is 
degenerate. 

There are many old and stately houses of stone in the place, 
with fine balconies, heavily barred windows, and massive doors. 
Many more, however, are new and braggart buildings of 
surpassing vulgarity. Here is a gracious fabric with windows and 
gateways of delicately sculptured stone. It may have been a 
convent or a university. It is now a lumber store, and its 
sensitive carved work is daubed over with barbarian whitewash. 
An alley leads into a paved courtyard where must have stalked in 
old days some arrogant Castilian ; but it is choked with rubbish, 
its many-pillared arcade is in ruins and its walls green with weeds. 
Balustrades of noble iron-work are crumbling into rust ; huge 
doors, which might have been battered upon by Drake's seamen, 
are falling off their hinges ; the dainty patio has become a place 
for the drying of clothes. 

There are some most picturesque churches still standing in 
this tragic city. Conspicuous among them is the rare church of 
Santa Barbara with its domed roof, its ancient windows, its 
curious tower of a long-forgotten fashion, and its sorry evidences 
of past magnificence. To the north of the city are the superb 
ruins of the San Francisco monastery, the walls of which are 
almost buried in green. Bushes and weeds fill the roofless aisles, 
but the main gateway, with its lofty arch and columns, is as 
perfect as it was centuries ago. 

Still, in spite of it all, San Domingo remains one of the most 
fascinating and most inspiring cities in these waters. It is perhaps 
none the worse for being out at elbows or for proclaiming in its 
streets the last scenes of the " Rake's Progress." To walk through 
its highways and its alleys is to turn over the pages of an old 
missal illumined with faded gilt and precious colours, the incense- 
perfumed leaves of which are patched with shreds of gutter 



248 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 

journals and interbound with gaudy prints, ballad sheets, and play 
bills. 

Near the River Gate is a sturdy ruin made up of two square 
towers joined by a central block. The whole structure is black 
and roofless. It has ample windows, and retains, in spite of the 
squalor which surrounds it, great dignity and assertiveness, for it 
was once " a magnifical and prince-lyke house." It is called the 
Almirante, and is claimed to be the castle which Columbus built, 
and in which he was confined when a prisoner and in chains. 



XLIX. 

THE TOMB OF COLUMBUS. 

From near the Water Gate the main street of San Domingo 
slouches along to the Cathedral Square. This is an unkempt 
space laid out, in a half-hearted manner, as a public garden. It 
affords thereby a withered lounging place for languid and untidy- 
idlers. Being graced by a theatrical statue of Columbus it takes 
to itself the name of the Parque Colon. 

On one side of it is the cathedral, a dignified and solid 
structure built by the men who planted the banner of Castile 
upon the shores of the New World. It stands in this tawdry, 
meretricious park an august memorial of the adventurous spirit of 
old Spain. Its weather-stained walls are venerable enough, for its 
foundations were laid in 15 14 and the last stone put in place 
twenty-six years later. Its roof is held up by noble pillars, while 
so vast is the fabric that in the recesses of its many chapels there 
hangs for ever the gloom of a tropic forest. 

In the roof there is said to be embedded a cannon-ball fired 
from one of Drake's ships. Drake's ordnance is hugely flattered 
by this legend. The ball — if such be there — is more probably one 
that was dropped into the square by the English in 1809, when 
they were attempting to wrest the city from the possession of the 
French. 

There leans against the wall in a side chapel a great, gaunt 
cross, nine feet high, made roughly of native wood. It might 
well have been fashioned by the axe of a devout pioneer, so 
simple is it. Cut in archaic figures on its front is the date MDXiv. 
This is said to be the identical cross set up to mark the site on 
which the cathedral was to be built. If this be true, it has stood 



250 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

within the shelter of these solemn walls for well-nigh 400 years. 
It has witnessed the shaking of those walls by more than 
one deathly earthquake. It has seen the great doors battered 
down by pirates, and the yelling horde pour into the solemn 
gloom with clatter of arms. It has witnessed the scurrying away 
of panting priests, the tearing down of images, the wolf-like 
scrambling over altar-plate. It may well be that some bare- 
legged ruffian, with a cutlass in his hand and a bloody cloth 
round his skull, has been brought to a stand before this austere 
emblem, and in making his obeisance has let drop at its foot the 
spoil he carried. 

On more than one dark night, too, the shadow of the cross 
has been cast on the wall by a gleam that flickered through the 
stained-glass windows — the red glare of the burning city. 

Beneath an overpowering modern monument of white marble, 
which reaches upwards out of sight and is brave with lions, 
shields, and mediaeval figures, is a bronze urn in which are 
deposited the remains of Christopher Columbus. The inscription 
on the casket runs thus : 

" A Cristobal Colon : descobridor de America." 

It is no profit to discuss here the authenticity of these relics. 
The great explorer died at Valladolid in 1506 and was buried 
there. Later his body was removed to the monastery of Las 
Cuevas at Seville. Thence his bones — after a rest of thirty years 
— started again on a voyage to the West Indies, to the Espafiola 
of his troubles, and to this very church. Their subsequent jour- 
neyings matter little, nor is it worth while to follow the juggling 
and shuffling to which the weary remains of Christopher and his 
brother Diego have been subjected in recent times. 

If he rests beneath this incense-mellowed roof, within sound 
of the sea and on the shore of that New World of his whose 
winter was " as May in Cordova," then his resting-place is fitting. 



p, — ^ 





CATHEDRAL, SAN DOMINGO. 
Showing the Tomb of Columbus. 



L. 

DRAKE AT SAN DOMINGO 

Of all ventures to the Indies ever essayed by Drake, none was so 
adventurous nor so dashing as the hazard of 1585. 

In the autumn of the previous year the great privateersman 
set sail from England with a squadron of twenty-five ships. It 
was the largest fleet that had ever crossed the Atlantic. Drake 
held no commission ; he launched forth upon the high seas 
without orders or authority. With him went 2300 men, 
men after his own heart, each as eager as a hawk. None of 
the crew received any pay. They were volunteers, every man 
of them, from the captain to the deck hand. Mariners from 
all parts had trudged to Plymouth with their bundles on their 
backs, and had sought out the shipping yard to enlist for the 
venture. Three visions were ablaze in their brains as they waited 
their turn at the ship-husband's door — the getting of loot, the 
killing of Spaniards, the joys of pirating. To not a few there was 
a fourth reason for volunteering — the glory of serving under the 
ever-victorious Drake. 

Many young bloods and courtly gentlemen, in quilted doublets 
and silk hose, with ribbon knots on their shoulders, joined the 
expedition. The general of the land forces was Christopher 
Carleil. Drake sailed in the Elizabeth Bonadventure. Francis 
Knolles, the Queen's cousin, was in the Leicester^ while the captain 
of the Primrose was Martin Frobisher, he of the North-west 
Passage, a tough old sailorman now fifty years of age. 

The fleet was away on the voyage nearly twelve months, for 
they reached Portsmouth safely in July 1585, "to the great glory 
of God." The voyage had been " rich and gainfull." The total 



252 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

plunder taken amounted to 60,000/. ; of this amount 40,000/. went 
to the " adventurers," to the stay-at-home folk who had provided 
the money, while the rest was divided among the officers and 
crew. 

Drake, having cleared the Channel, turned south and put in at 
Vigo, to the terror of the inhabitants, and to the dumbfounded 
indignation of Spain. England and Spain were not at war at the 
time ; Drake had no excuse for making a hostile entry into 
a Spanish port ; yet he sailed his ships in quietly, anchored at his 
leisure, and looked around to see what damage he could do. 

To the Court of Spain this was an act of inconceivable 
nsolence. That these wretched islanders should dare to insult 
the sacred soil of Spain was a thing beyond believing. Spain was 
the mistress of the sea ; Spain owned half of the known world ; 
while these uncouth seamen hailed from paltry England, from 
a state which owned its very existence to the forbearance of 
Philip. The impertinence of Francis Drake staggered Europe. 
As well might a street urchin have tugged with mudded hands at 
the robe of an archbishop, as his Grace stalked by in solemn 
procession. Froude says that the Council of State sat for three 
days aghast, staring at one another as if paralysed by the 
enormity of the affront. 

Drake, quite unconscious of the stir he was making, " held up " 
all the boats he found in Vigo Sound. The majority contained 
only country produce, useful to the ship's purser, but of no notice- 
able value. One craft, however, was come across " laden with the 
principal church stuff of the High Church of Vigo, where also was 
their great cross of silver, of very fair embossed work and double- 
gilt all over, having cost them a great mass of money." ^ This 
boat Drake took. 

The town, of course, was in a panic. The citizens were fleeing 
to the country as fast as their heels and mules could take them. 
The distracted governor, shaking with alarm, sent as a peace 
offering to the English admiral a boat-load of wine, oil, apples and 
marmalade. This present Drake was graciously pleased to accept, 

' Account by Thomas Gates. Hakluyt Society. 



DRAKE AT SAN DOMINGO. 253 

although he probably pronounced the apples very inferior to those 
of Devon. 

The governor next ventured to beg a parley. The con- 
descending Englishman granted it, but, as he had no confidence in 
Spanish officials, suggested that they should meet in the centre of 
the harbour, each in his own skiff. The governor — a small, fat 
man, I expect — was rowed off in his best uniform, very white in 
the face no doubt, his lips dry, and his gloved hands clutching at 
the gunwale of the wherry. Drake appears to have been brief but 
very cheery, adopting some such tone as this — " So glad to have 
seen Vigo harbour ! Nice day for the water ! Thanks, he had 
got all he wanted. He would not trouble his Excellency further. 
Good morning ! " More than one eager watcher, including those 
who, with bags of money stuffed up their backs, were peeping out 
of cellar doors, must have exclaimed " Thank God ! " as the British 
vanished from the estuary. 

After various adventures Drake found himself, on the last day 
of the year, off " the brave city of San Domingo," " the famous 
and goodly-builded city." He anchored over against the town, 
somewhere about the spot where the present-day steamer finds a 
berth. He would see before him a city built of stone, " as 
gorgeous as Seville or Cadiz," and not very greatly altered from 
the sea-town which meets the eye of the traveller of to-day. He 
would look upon the same castle at the river's mouth, the same 
great wall and bastions about the precincts, the same cathedral 
dome and monastery towers. If Drake came to San Domingo 
now he would miss the public gallows on the headland, it is true, 
and would notice that an iron lighthouse and a three-storied 
American brewery were new since he last dropped anchor in the 
roadstead. 

Drake made pretence to land a force at the town. What he 
actually did, however, was to send off 1000 men, about the dead 
of night, in boats with muffled oars. They were to row ten 
miles westward down the coast, land, and make a forced march 
back to the city as the day dawned. The next morning was New 
Year's Day. The empty boats having returned to the anchorage, 



254 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Drake made fussy preparations to land an imaginary army, looking 
at the same time eagerly to the west to seek for signs of the 
advancing column which was under the command of Carleily. 

The deluded Spaniards crowded to the sea-walls. At last, 
about noon, a horseman could be seen galloping for the west gate 
of the town. He was bringing the news. He was followed in 
time by a straggling company of peasants running for the shelter 
of the ramparts. The English were advancing beyond a doubt. 
The alarm spread in the city. Men left the walls. A troop of 
150 horsemen were seen to dash out of the San Lazaro gate to 
meet the pirates. Their breast-plates glistened in the sun, while 
the jingle of their arms could be heard from the ships' decks as 
they vanished into the jungle. They were a picked company, the 
nobility of San Domingo, since every man in the squadron was 
a hidalgo of some degree. 

Soon the sound of firing was to be heard among the trees. 
From the commotion it .was evident that the English were 
advancing in two columns, each making for one of the gates. 
The watchers next saw a whole rabble in flight, pressing for the 
city, followed by scattered horsemen, who had been routed and 
turned back. At last across the clearing between the jungle and 
the wall came the British storming party, rushing forward at the 
double. As they crossed the open the crews of the ships raised 
a yell which must have sounded in the city like the baying of a 
pack of hounds. 

Cannon shots were fired from the curtain and the bastions. 
The hidalgos tried to re-form at the gates, but only for a moment. 
They could face small shot, but they could not face the bristling 
line of pikes gripped by these savage, panting men, who came on 
like a breaking sea. The two gates were rushed, and the town 
became suddenly full of noise, of sounds of men shouting, of guns 
firing, of alarm bells hurriedly tolled. 

Those on the ships would have a view perhaps down a sunlit 
street, wherein they could see frantic women at the upper windows 
and the men below barricading doors. There would be a nervous 
crowd at the cross-way, all looking westwards, their hands on' one 



DRAKE AT SAN DOMINGO. 255 

another's shoulders. Suddenly something would come into their 
view, so that they scattered precipitately with a yell, " The pirates 
are coming ! " The women slammed to the shutters, and the 
place was still. In another moment, across the deserted street 
end, a company of English pikemen tore by, like a tornado, and 
after they had passed heads came again out of windows and 
scared folk out of dark entries. 

Drake, standing on the poop of the Bonadventure, must have 
felt for a time that the issue was uncertain. The English were 
making for the cathedral close — " a very fair, spacious square," as 
they afterwards spoke of it. It is the place now occupied by the 
unornamental garden. 

The firing was ceasing ; the town was becoming quiet. What 
had happened ? Had Carleil's men fallen into a trap ? To those 
who hung over the bulwarks of the ships, or who had climbed the 
rigging for a better view, the suspense became beyond endurance. 
Fists were clenched ; men muttered in whispers ; Drake stalked 
to and fro as restless as a caged lion. On a moment, from the 
flagstaff of a tower, there broke into the blue above the city the 
banner of St. George of England. The lads of Devon had won ! 

The attacking party were a little too small to make themselves 
at once masters of the entire city. So they entrenched themselves 
in the square, erected barricades, and arranged for a bivouac. It 
may be supposed that they looted provisions from the houses 
around, for Drake reports that they " found good store for their 
relief" in the city. A fire would be made in the square out of 
window shutters and other handy fuel, while with a few chairs 
and tables removed from convenient parlours near by the pirates 
would be able to enjoy a welcome meal. 

When night fell the camp fire would light up a hundred beam- 
ing faces and would throw strange shadows across the illumined 
fagade of the cathedral. Any bold citizen who peeped into the 
square, about the hour of compline, might have thought that this 
flame-coloured horde had come straight from the Bottomless Pit. 

The invaders, however, were not in a mood for sleep. Indeed 
about midnight " they made themselves busy about the gates of 



256 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

the castle," that very castle that stands at the river's mouth. As 
a result of their battering on the gate, the garrison of the fortress, 
who had no stomach for night alarms, fled across the stream, and, 
leaving their boats, ran inland until they were safely hid by the 
forest. 

Drake held the town for four weeks, looting it with great 
method and precision. The negotiations for a ransom were rather 
tedious, so Drake expressed his intention of destroying the city 
piecemeal unless the money was paid. " We spent the early 
morning," says Thomas Gates, the writer of the chronicle, " in 
firing the outmost houses ; but they being built very magnificently 
of stone with high lofts gave us no small travail to ruin them." 
Two hundred men were engaged upon this excellent work. They 
commenced their labours punctually at daybreak and worked with 
business-like patience until 9 A.M., when owing to the heat they 
desisted. Thomas Gates, who evidently took this particular task 
very much to heart, owns with regret that, in spite of earnest 
efforts, they were not able to destroy more than one-third of the 
town up to date. 

The Spaniards, perceiving that the disappearance of their 
beloved city was merely a question of time, proposed to buy the 
housebreakers out for the sum pf 25,000 ducats.^ These early 
morning fires, accompanied as they were by the noise of falling 
roofs and walls, had become so real a nuisance to the quiet-loving 
citizens that they were prepared to act on the principle of paying 
a noisome organ-grinder to cease grinding. Drake, after some 
sneering comment upon the paltriness of the sum, agreed to 
accept it, and, taking with him the eighty cannon the town 
possessed, together with other mementoes, sailed away to the 
south, solaced by the sense of his generous action. 

' A sum equal probably to 6875/. 



LI. 

THE BUCCANEERS. 

ESPANOLA will ever be famous as tfie cradle of the great race of 
the Buccaneers. They came into being under noticeable cir- 
cumstances. Spain's first act after the discovery and conquest of 
the New World was to proclaim her exclusive right to all those 
territories of which she had any knowledge or even any suspicion. 
The Pope, " to whose hands the heathen were entrusted by God, to 
be handed for an inheritance to the highest and most religious 
bidder," ^ granted to Spain, in 1493, the possession of all lands 
lying to the west of a meridian drawn 100 leagues westward 
of the Azores, and to Portugal all lands lying to the east of 
that line, the said line to extend to the Arctic and Antarctic 
poles respectively. At a later date the Brazils were generously 
left to the latter State. 

Spain had, by the time now dealt with, established her rule 
over the West Indies, as well as over Central and South America, 
had subdued the mighty empires of Mexico and Peru, and had 
made settlements along the coasts from California to Chili, and 
from Florida to the River Plate. 

From this not-inconsiderable section of the globe all foreigners 
were excluded. Every stranger who found his way into the 
Caribbean Sea was, in the eyes of Spain, a pirate, and was 
treated as such. Any settler was as unwelcome and as 
malignant. 

Now, coincident with this, reports reached Europe that these 
excluded lands were very rich and very wonderful. In England, 
at the same time, there had developed a hatred of Spain — based 

' Christopher Columbus, by Filson Young, vol. i. page 257 : London, 1906. 

S 



258 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

mainly upon points of religion — which was little short of a 
monomania. The Inquisition fanned that hatred from a glowing 
ember into a devouring flame. English sailors had been captured, 
had been put into dungeons as heretics, had been starved and 
tortured, set to work in the galleys, or burned to death in a fool's 
cap before a jeering market-place crowd. Privateering became 
the occupation of honourable. God-fearing gentlemen. To rob, 
fire, or scuttle a Catholic ship was a commendable work of grace. 

In 1588 came the defeat of the Great Armada and the 
breaking up of the sea power of the arrogant mistress of the 
world. In defiance of the ban of Spain, a strange company began 
to collect at the westernmost corner of Espanola. They came 
across the seas in obedience to no call ; in ones and twos they 
came. Frenchmen, British, and, Dutch, and, led by some herding 
instinct, they foregathered at this wild trysting place. Some were 
mere dare-devil adventurers, others were wily seekers after fortune , 
the few were in flight from the grip of justice, the many had 
roamed away from the old sober world in search of freedom. 

There was a common tie that banded them together, the call 
of the wild and the hate of Spain. They formed no colony nor 
settlement, but simply joined themselves together in a kind of 
jungle brotherhood. They found a leader as a pack of wolves 
find theirs, not by choosing one to lead but by following the 
one who led. Some of the party undertook a little haphazard 
planting, some became dilettante fishermen. The greater number, 
however, hunted the cattle with which the island was overrun. 
The ancestors of these herds had come from Spain, had escaped 
to the bush, where they had multiplied and grown free. The 
hunters, or cowboys, traded with the hides they obtained, while 
they preserved the meat by smoking it upon a buccan, a wooden 
rack or frame which they found in use by the Caribs. This 
buccaned meat became an article of commerce, and the traders 
called themselves buccaneers, or smoked-meat men. 

In time, as they grew in numbers, they took to pirating. 
They manned the long canoes of the natives, and attacked the 
ship that passed in the night, as well as the galleon that lay 



THE BUCCANEERS. 259 

becalmed in the sleepy sun. In this wise they got vessels of their 
own, arms and men, as well as the wherewithal to become 
dissipated and rich. 

Out of such perfervid beginnings there arose in the Caribbean 
seas a curious and heterogeneous association of filibusters, who 
through the whole of the seventeenth century wielded a terrifying 
power among the West Indian islands, and along the Spanish 
Main. During many years of that century they proved to be men 
of amazing enterprise, and of chivalrous valour who were not 
actuated wholly by sordid motives, nor the mere seeking after 
loot. To carve their way to greatness through a tangle of 
violence and robbery, to maintain with never-relaxing tenacity 
the vendetta against Spain, involved a set purpose as well as a 
buoyant spirit. It involved, moreover, acts of treachery and 
deeds of revenge, cruelty enough to poison the good green earth, 
malice enough to blot out the ever-smiling sun. 

Yet at the same time these buccaneers became famous as some 
of the world's greatest navigators. They developed the art of 
seamanship ; they discovered lands ; they added to the science of 
natural history ; they attacked and captured great cities and — 
most curious of all — did much to establish the staid authority of 
England in these lawless waters.^ 

That in the end they degenerated into mere rogues and cut- 
throats may well be supposed. Some, it is true, became honest 
seamen and colonists, while others settled down among their 
friends the Darien Indians. The very last of the race slunk about 
ill-favoured harbours that lay beyond the track of ships. They 
had scarcely nerve enough left to rob the market boats as they 
drifted blithely from the plantation to the little port They could 
still bluster and brag and curse. They might mock at the gallows 
when they were flushed with rum, yet would fain rub the mark of 
Cain off their brows when they were hiding in the mangrove 
swamp.^ 

' Dampier, the great navigator, was a buccaneer as well as a copious writer on 
natural history. Henry Morgan, the pirate, became deputy governor of Jamaica. 
^ The buccaneers, as a band, were broken up after the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. 



260 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

During the period of their greatest prosperity the Buccaneers 
made their headquarters at Tortuga Island, which Hes just off the 
north-west point of Espafiola. The retreat was protected on the 
north by inaccessible precipices and on the south by shoals and 
reefs. On the sheltered side of Tortuga was a deep-water bay 
within a circle of red cliff. At the foot of the height lay white 
sands, while on the summit was the tousled jungle. This was the 
freebooter's home, his pleasure house, his haven of peace. Here 
on the beach he careened his ships, landed his gold, his altar plate 
and his spices, filled his water-casks, and mended his gear. Here 
too, with infinite wrangling and blasphemy, he divided the tub-full 
of pieces of eight. 

The beach would seem too white, too virginal, for such a scene, 
the sea too delicately blue. Yet here on the sand they squatted 
in an unholy semicircle, the captain and his crew, some sitting on 
chests or brandy kegs or leaning across barrels, snapping and 
growling over the money, like wolves over a carcass. 

The captain is enthroned on a stout sea chest. He is an 
execrable-looking villain, with a bedraggled moustache and dirt- 
matted hair. His face is so weather-hardened and so tanned that 
his features may have been carved out of teak. One of his eyes 
has been gouged from its socket, while the lid of the other is made 
to droop by reason of a sabre cut which has left a pink streak 
across his temple. He is dressed in a green satin coat with 
voluminous skirts ; it is buttonless yet shows shreds of lace, while 
the cuffs have been slit up to allow his hairy arms to burst 
through. He wears pantaloons of bullock-blood red, canary- 
coloured stockings and heavy shoes. A couple of pistols stick out 
of the scarlet sash around his waist. He has gold rings in his 
ears and a wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head. He is just 
now " high in oath " and is directing the division of the silver with 
the point of a cutlass, deciding any finer detail by a throw of the 
dice. 

His crew are an unsavoury gang of wide-shouldered, iron- 
limbed men. They affect bright-tinted shirts, voluminous breeches 
and bare legs. Some have their hair gathered up into greasy nets, 



THE BUCCANEERS. 261 

others wear a pigtail tied around with a strip of bunting. The 
most popular head covering is a palm-leaf hat or a gaudy hand- 
kerchief wrapped about the forehead, turban-wise. One man is 
nursing the stump of an arm which is bound up in bloody linen 
secured by spun yarn. Between them they show wounds enough 
to keep a surgeon busy. They are much tattooed ; the favourite 
designs that grace their skins being a cross, a naked woman and a 
devil with a forked tail. On one man's shaggy chest hangs a 
crucifix, while round the bull-neck of another is a lady's string of 
pearls. They are armed with pistols and hangers as well as with 
long knives in shark-skin sheaths. 

Such were the Buccaneers, and it is small wonder that they 
struck terror wherever they came. Their early exploits are well 
illustrated by an account of a foray conducted by the then leader, 
Pierre le Grand, a native of Dieppe. 

The sea rovers were at the time in low water, being indeed 
short of food, short of ships, short of everything. They contrived, 
however, to man a large native canoa with a crew of twenty-eight 
meat-curers. Leaving Tortuga they crept along the coast of 
Espanola as far as Cape Tiburon, but met with no fortune on the 
way. Off the cape these weary men with empty stomachs were 
refreshed by a glorious sight. A huge Spanish galleon, flying the 
flag of the vice-admiral of the fleet, was making for the Wind- 
ward Passage close hauled. 

The wind was light, the sun dazzling, and the sea almost 
without a ripple. The crew of the man-of-war were lying down 
in the shadow of the bulwarks or in the lee of the deck-house. 
The watch had nothing to do but idle away the afternoon. No 
one would dare attack an admiral's galleon. So the canoa 
with the twenty-eight hungry meat-curers passed by unnoticed. 
With superb audacity the buccaneers paddled under the towering 
stern, jammed the rudder and clambered up on to the deck by 
means of the channel boards. 

The quartermaster at the helm, who was nodding over the 
tiller dreaming of Castile, was knocked senseless by a blow on 
the skull. The first dazed man of the watch who stumbled to his 



262 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

feet had a long knife driven through his chest Pierre and his 
crew then rushed into the state cabin, knocking over the sentinel 
as they stumbled down the stair. The captain and his officers 
were sitting round a table in their shirt sleeves playing cards. 
Through the door burst the savage rabble of half-naked, unkempt 
men. " Jesus bless us ! " yelled the captain, throwing down his 
cards ; " are these devils or what are they ? " 

In a while, after much hubbub of pistol shot and cutlass hacks, 
mingled with the crashing of furniture and the cursing of men, 
the cabin became as quiet as before. Pierre landed all the 
Spaniards he did not want, dined sumptuously in the card-strewn 
cabin and sailed his prize home to France, where he sold her to 
his great profit and contentment.^ 

' The Buccaneers of America, by John Esquemeling : London, 1893. History of 
the Buccaneers of America, by Captain James Burney, R.N. : London, 189 1. On the. 
Spanish Main, by John Masefield : London, 1906. Dampier's Voyages, 



LII. 

"OUR WELL BELOVED." 

ESPANOLA is associated with a critical period in the life of that 
picturesque pirate, Captain Kidd. William Kidd was a native of 
Greenock, and a reputable seaman who traded industriously along 
the American coast. He was so much respected by those who 
knew him that in 1695 he was entrusted with a commission to 
suppress piracy. The commission emanated from " William the 
Third, by the grace of God King of England, Scotland, France 
and Ireland, Defender of the Faith," and was addressed to " our 
trusty and well beloved Captain William Kidd, of the ship 
Adventure, gaily." 

The well-beloved William was instructed to deal summarily 
with " divers wicked and ill-disposed persons who were com- 
mitting many and great pyraces to the great danger and hurt 
of our loving subjects." ^ William was indeed to purge the seas, 
to stamp out wickedness, and to proclaim on the ocean highways 
the majesty of the law. 

The Adventure sailed from Plymouth on her most righteous 
mission in May 1696, with a crew of 155 men all intent upon a 
search for the "wicked and ill-disposed persons" above named. 
None of these depraved people, however, appear to have come in 
the way of the trusty captain. He reported no arrests, he brought 
in no prizes, and, as a matter of fact, nothing was heard of him 
after he had passed from beyond the English Channel. The 
Adventure, indeed, might have sailed away into the clouds. 

News did come at last, and the purport of the same was 
discouraging. It was rumoured that this guardian of the law, this 

' The History of the Pyrates, by Captain C. Johiison, vol. ii. : London, 1726. 



264 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

protector of " our loving subjects," was himself actually doing an 
excellent business as a pirate. Among other exploits he had 
taken a rich French merchantman named the Queda. Now it so 
happened that the missionary ship Adventure at this juncture was 
pronounced unseaworthy, so Master Kidd very heartlessly sunk 
her, after he had removed his guns, his stores, and his more 
treasured cabin furniture to the Queda. 

He sailed his vessel to Espanola and there heard — probably at 
San Domingo — that he was " wanted," and indeed that there was 
a warrant out against him for divers acts of piracy. This so hurt 
the finer feelings of Kidd, the well beloved of kings, that he 
bought a sloop at Espanola and hurried over to Boston to explain 
the true facts to the authorities, and to vindicate his honour. 
Kidd, it may be mentioned, had never shown himself to be 
lacking in audacity. 

His explanation was to the effect that his crew had proved to 
be utterly abandoned, and had, indeed, so far forgotten themselves 
that they had threatened to shoot him and had actually locked 
him up in his cabin. While he was thus rudely confined, and 
trying to console himself no doubt by reading once more the 
charming communication made to him by William the Third, the 
Defender of the Faith, these profligate men had committed acts of 
piracy to his infinite pain and distress. He had felt it his duty to 
hurry to Boston to tell the kind governor how very base his men 
had been, and to seek his sympathy and support. 

Asked what had become of the Queda, and her cargo of goods 
valued at 70,000/., the ill-used William deeply regretted that he 
was unable to inform his Excellency on that point. Asked as to 
the welfare of a certain gunner on the Adventure named Moore, 
Master Kidd reported, with some emotion, that that mariner was 
no longer with them ; in fact, the bereaved captain could do 
no more than say, in the words of Scripture, that Moore "was 
not, for the Lord took him." Asked whether he had smashed 
Moore's skull in by hitting him over the head with a bucket, 
the suppressor of pirates owned that he had adopted that method 
of rebuking Moore. Moore, he explained, was unfortunate in his 
manner, was disrespectful and indeed mutinous. Furthermore he 



" "OUR WELL BELOVED." 265 

was constrained to add, without wishing to speak ill of the dead, 
that the late gunner had shown an odious leaning towards piracy. 

As a result of this informing conversation in the Governor's 
office at Boston "our trusty and well beloved Captain William 
Kidd " found himself, with some of his crew, in the dock of the 
Old Bailey in the month of May 1701. So faithless was William 
the Third to his trusty servant that Kidd actually came to be 
charged in the King's name with being a pirate and with being 
the murderer of Gunner Moore. Such are the uncertainties of 
the law that on both these indictments the ex-captain was found 
guilty. 

Nine of the crew of the Adventure were tried with their mis- 
understood master. Three of these were dismissed and among 
them was Richard Barlicorne, the apprentice, who probably had 
blood-congealing tales to tell when he reached the shelter of the 
alehouse in his native village. 

Kidd and his six companions were hanged at Execution Dock 
on May 23. They were afterwards "hung up in chains, at some 
distance from each other, down the River, where their bodies hung 
exposed for many years." There is little doubt but that for long 
sailor men, beating up and down the Thames in their hoys and 
billyboys, would look out for a wind-blown gibbet on the dreariest 
mud flat, and would say as they passed " There swings Captain 
Kidd." 

All that was left of him in time was a tangle of white bones in 
a rusty cage, with shoes still rattling on the feet, with shreds 
hanging from the limbs which might be rags of clothing or strips 
of skin, and with teeth which chattered when the jawbone was 
shaken in the breeze. There they swung for dismal months, 
Kidd and his crew of six, watching the tide swirl up and down 
the stream, watching the home-coming craft and the outward 
bound. Perhaps Richard Barlicorne, when his nerves were a little 
restored, may have had the curiosity to visit the Thames to have 
a look at the captain with whom he had served his strange 
apprenticeship. He may well have wondered where his own 
place would have been in the jangling line if the evidence had 
been a little more convincing. 



266 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The estate of Captain William Kidd, deceased, realised the sum 
of 6742/. IS., which money was handed over to Greenwich 
Hospital. That admirable institution may therefore count a dead 
buccaneer among its subscribers, and acknowledge that it owes 
some benefits to acts of piracy on the high seas. 

The Queda, merchantman, was never found. It is supposed 
that the treasure she contained was buried on an island, and that the 
deserted ship, with many auger holes in her bilge, hid her shame 
— as did the Adventure — in the depths of the blameless sea. 
Common rumour said that it was on Gardiner's Island that most 
of the loot was hidden. Whether that be true or not it is certain 
that the property never came again into the possession of its 
rightful owners. Very probably some of Kidd's old companions, 
by the aid of mystic and much-thumbed charts, went back to the 
cave where, with many a glance seaward, they dug furtively for 
the pieces of gold and the bags of precious stones. 

Readers of fiction will remember that, according to Edgar 
Allan Poe, a Mr. William Le Grand discovered this identical 
booty by means of a gold bug, a human skull in a tree, and a 
miraculously preserved parchment on which was drawn the figure 
of a kid. This particular treasure was found in the regulation 
chest of the pirate story, to wit, in a much knobbed trunk provided 
with six iron rings. The wealth contained therein was, in the 
matter of profusion and brilliancy, scarcely eclipsed by the villain's 
horde on the pantomime stage. The catalogue comprised much 
gold, together with no diamonds, "some of them exceedingly 
large and fine," 83 crucifixes and no less than " 197 superb gold 
watches, all richly jewelled and in cases of great worth." 

The gold watches are quite en regie. All popular coloured 
prints depicting " The Mariner's Return " show a smirking lady in 
a short frock greeting a bearded seaman, who, besides the orthodox 
bundle on a stick, carries a parrot and a number of gold watches 
with chains. The strange fowl serves to indicate an acquaintance 
with foreign parts, the time-pieces the invariable reward of the 
faithful and conscientious follower of the sea. 



LIII. 

ON THE WAY TO JAMAICA. 

The next authorised stopping place in the way of our steamer 
was Kingston, Jamaica ; but owing to the earthquake it had been 
decreed that we could not put in there, but must go rather to Port 
Antonio on the north of the island. 

The first intimation of the calamity which had befallen Kingston 
reached me at Trinidad. The news came in this wise. The ship 
had hardly dropped her anchor off Port of Spain before we were 
boarded by the usual miscellaneous folk who emerge from the 
waters of every tropical haven. Among them was a heated man, 
in a white linen jacket, who was tense to bursting from something 
within him. He asked me hurriedly, and in the manner of an 
irritable policeman, " Where I was going ? " I said " To Kingston, 
Jamaica." He replied authoritatively " You cannot go there," as 
if Kingston were a place from which trespassers were excluded. 
I asked " Why ? " He said " Because Kingston does not exist ; 
there is no such place." I was about to inquire who had thus 
rudely tampered with the map of the globe, wh^n he remarked, 
with a gush of pent-up breath, " It has been wiped out by an 
earthquake ! Clean gone ! Not a brick left ! " Before I could 
explain that I was not going to Kingston in search of bricks he 
had vanished explosively. 

On the journey from San Domingo to Port Antonio the 
steamer crosses the ocean highway on whose broad bosom was 
enacted the opening scene of the " War of Jenkins' Ear." The 
parties to this bitter conflict were the two great European Powers, 
England and Spain. The war was the oiitcome of long-existing 
differences, of petty insults and of irritating reprisals. Relations 



268 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

between the two peoples were clouded and threatening, yet the 
thunderbolt had not fallen. It was Jenkins' ear that brought the 
whole seething, smouldering business to a climax. It was Jenkins' 
auricle that caused the storm to burst. The British had been 
heroically patient, but when they contemplated this fragment of 
the anatomy of Jenkins their restraint gave way. It was no 
longer possible to hold back the dogs of war. 

Robert Jenkins was the master of the brig Rebecca, and was 
engaged in trading between the West Indies and London. In 
April 173 1, the unsuspecting Rebecca was returning home to 
London from Jamaica by this very passage. Robert Jenkins had 
a full cargo ; he was at peace with all men, and was looking 
forward to the enjoyment of " the blessings of the land with the 
fruits of his labours." He may be assumed to have been sailing 
along, humming to himself the then equivalent of " Home, Sweet 
Home," when he was brutally attacked by a Spanish Guarda- 
costa, who boarded him in a most offensive and truculent manner. 
The gentle Jenkins could offer no resistance ; so the Spaniard 
promptly looted the brig and robbed the master of his little all. 

Before the miscreants left the naked and bewildered Rebecca 
to find her way as best she could to London, a very sickly episode 
was witnessed on her decks. The exact mise en scene is a little 
obscure. Probably Jenkins was rude to the officer and very likely 
" cheeked " him, as a sailor from the Lower Thames could do with 
great power. I expect Robert was chased about the deck cursing, 
was caught by black-bearded men, who dragged him aft by his 
coat collar and then tied him with ropes to the mainmast. There 
he would be in sight of such of his crew as had fled below and, 
by standing on the table, were able to peep out of the cabin 
skylight. The scene of martyrdom would be in sight also of 
Jenkins' dog who was cowering, with a look of ineffectual com- 
passion, under the bulwarks. 

The captain of the Guarda-costa now approached Jenkins with 
a grin, and taking hold of one of his red ears as if it had been 
a ripe fruit, lopped it off from his hpad with a heavy knife. The 
blood, no doubt, squirted across the deck ; the dog would crawl 



ON THE WAY TO JAMAICA. - 269 

out to inspect the crimson blotch, would understand its meaning 
and retire still more humbly compassionate. Any of the crew at 
the skylight who had a grudge against the " old man " may have 
grinned and have remarked, with leering satisfaction, that "the 
skipper had got something for himself this time." 

The Spaniard, with the fine courtesy of his race, placed Jenkins' 
auricle on the binnacle with ostentatious care, as if it had been 
a floral offering. He then earnestly begged Jenkins to take the 
memento home with him, and, bowing gravely, wished the master 
of the Rebecca " Bon voyage ! " 

How Jenkins expressed himself to his shipmates after the 
visitors had left and while his bands were being loosened is not 
known. That he commented upon the behaviour of the Spaniards 
in the vivid language of Wapping is probable ; that he kicked the 
fawning and too sympathetic dog is also probable, 

" First Aid " would, no doubt, be rendered him by the ship's 
carpenter, who, in conformity with the surgery of the time, would 
staunch the bleeding with crude turpentine, and then dress the 
stump with a piece of bunting dipped in lamp oil, and secured by 
a red handkerchief 

One thing Jenkins did not fail to do. He did not forget to 
bring his ear back with him, as the courteous Spaniard had 
advised. He probably placed the precious relic between two folds 
of sail cloth, and then locked it up in the drawer where he kept his 
sextant, his Bible and his bottle of rum. There at least it would 
be safe from the rats. The Rebecca was a long time getting 
home, for she did not reach London until June 11, by which 
date the stump of Jenkins' ear, stimulated, no doubt, from time 
to time by the application of a little tar, must have been nicely 
healed. 

Jenkins, when he had berthed his brig in the Thames, lost no 
time in proclaiming his martyrdom and in bringing his sufferings 
before a horrified country. The ear no doubt was exhibited 
upon many a tavern table to both publicans and sinners, and 
was shown as well to the shocked parson and to the indignant 
squire. If the repeated narrative made Jenkins thirsty they were 



270 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

many who were proud to relieve that thirst if only they might 
hold the seaweed-coloured remains for a moment in their very 
hands. Jenkins' dead ear became the badge of an infuriated faction, 
just as was once the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of 
York. 

In 1738 the master of the Rebecca gained to the fountain head, 
for he was examined before a committee of the House of Com- 
mons. Seven years had now elapsed since the operation and, as 
antiseptics were not then in use, Jenkins' pinna, or external ear, 
must have been sadly changed. Its outlines would probably have 
become as indefinite as those of a crushed date. 

That the captain attended at Westminster in his best clothes 
and with his hair nicely tied up in a pigtail may be assumed. 
That the amputation stump was not looking its best at the time 
is probable. Jenkins, however, at the inquiry brought forth the 
relic, or rather, as the historian says, "he produced something 
which he asserted was his ear." This something he no doubt 
extracted from his trousers pocket with great solemnity and 
deliberation. It was a dramatic moment. The something would 
be between two layers of much-thumbed sail cloth. Jenkins 
would proceed to separate the parts as a man would open 
a sandwich to demonstrate what was within it. Then to the 
sickened legislators would he reveal a horrible thing called by its 
owner an ear, but which might as well be the shrivelled husk of 
some ill-smelling fruit. 

There appears to have been no anatomical examination made 
of the " specimen." The committee were indeed quite uneasy 
until it was wrapped up and lurched back into Jenkins' pocket 
again. 

The captain made one mistake. He was asked by an 
inquisitive member of the committee how he felt under the 
operation. Jenkins was ready for this. Drawing himself erect, 
and removing the tobacco quid from his cheek for clearer speech, 
the injured mariner, with eyes turned to heaven and with uplifted 
hand, said " I committed my soul to God and my cause to my 
country ! " Now this was not like Jenkins. This was not the 



ON THE WAY TO JAMAICA. 271 

speech of Gravesend nor of Port Royal. It was very beautiful, 
very noble, but it was not Wapping. 

Anyhow the ear, or the something asserted to be an ear, led to 
the war, which same was declared some few months after Jenkins' 
inspiring speech. It was not a very successful campaign ; so 
people began to turn against Jenkins. They began to regard his 
story as "extremely doubtful," if not a pure invention. They 
considered him, in short, a liar. The least kindly disposed went 
so far as to say that the disgusting thing that Jenkins had hawked 
about for seven years was not a human ear at all, and that if it 
was, then Jenkins had lost it in the pillory in the ordinary course 
of justice. 

The island of Jamaica, which we are now approaching, has 
been in the possession of England since 1655. It was captured in 
that year by Penn and Venables, who had been sent out by 
Cromwell with general instructions "to obtain establishment in 
that part of the West Indies which is possessed by the Spaniards." 

These two warriors are always spoken of as " Penn and 
Venables " as if they were members of some commercial firm. 
They were a very curious couple. Penn was an admiral and 
Venables a general. They left England on Christmas Day 1654, 
and made for San Domingo, which they reached in April of the 
next year. Here Venables landed with a force of 7000 men for 
the purpose of taking the city. His army was undisciplined, ill 
paid, and ill equipped. He was disgracefully repulsed, for his 
men turned and fled from a small party of negroes and Spaniards 
who burst out upon them from an ambush with horrible yells, 
close under the walls of the city.^ 

Venables declined to try again ; so the firm left Espanola and 
moved on to Jamaica. They reached Passage Fort, the seaward 
fort of the old capital, on May 10. Penn had had, by this time, 
quite enough of soldiers and more than enough of Venables, so 
he led the attack himself in a little galley called the Martin^ 
stormed the fort and took it, and, with it, Jamaica. 

The military partner in the firm did not land until he saw that 
* The Royal Navy, by Sir William Laird Clowes, vol, ii. : London, 1897. 



272 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

all resistance was over, and although the British boats came by 
cheering, close to the ship on which he stood, " he continued 
walking about, wrapped up in his cloak, with his hat over his 
eyes, looking as if he had been studying of physic more than the 
general of an army." It may be here said that the costume and 
attitude of Venables during this crisis are not characteristic of the 
modern medical student during periods of disturbance, although it 
may be a correct picture of the budding doctor in Cromwellian 
times. 

It is probable that Venables, as he stalked the deck with his 
hat over his eyes, was thinking of trout and dace fishing, for he 
was the author of a work entitled " The Experienced Angler, or 
Angling Improved." 

The experienced angler reached England on September 9 
1655, "almost a skeleton," and was promptly sent to the Tower, 
where he possibly occupied his enforced leisure by fishing in the 
moat. 

Admiral Penn, when he returned from the wars, was also at 
once sent to the Tower, as if it had been a convalescent home for 
officers. His imprisonment, however, only lasted a few weeks, 
for the charge against him was merely that of returning home 
without leave. 

Penn, who had suffered so much from the acts of his junior 
partner, is described as " a mild-spoken, fair-haired man, with a 
comely round visage." He would seem, therefore,- to have been 
a gentle creature of the type of the Cheeryble Brothers, but Pepys, 
who was his surbordinate, hated him with a poisonous hatred. 
He has made him immortal in his famous Diary, where he refers 
to him as " a mean and cunning rogue," as " a very villain," 
and finally, in the delirium of his wrath, as " a coxcomb." 




THE king's house, SPANISH TOWN. 




A STREET IN SPANISH TOWN. 



LIV. 

SPANISH TOWN. 

Jamaica, as the world well knows, is a gracious and beautiful 
island, of whose delights many appreciative accounts are to be found 
in the literature of the West Indies. Possessed of an infinitely- 
picturesque coast line, of glorious valleys and romantic glades, of 
such heights as the Blue Mountains, of such rivers as the Roaring 
River and the Rio Cobre, Jamaica may claim to be, as John 
Sparke ^ would express it, " a country marvellously sweet." 

Those to whom Port Antonio chances to afford the earliest 
sight of a West Indian harbour will well understand why Colum- 
bus named the first bay that he came upon Santa Gloria, and 
why the early travellers spoke of the island as an earthly paradise. 
The palm-fringed haven of Port Antonio is as delightful a spot 
as will be found anywhere in these seas. The town itself is an 
American settlement, to which flock, in the winter time, countless 
tourists from the United States. 

The place, though small, is the centre of the banana trade 
between the island and the great continent. Banana plants flood 
the adjacent land with leagues of delicate green. They cover the 
feet of the everlasting hills ; they line each dip and dell ; they 
follow the highway persistently all the way across the country to 
the very outskirts of Kingston. 

It is a better and finer banana than that which so delighted 
the comra^^es of Drake. Those hungry pioneers described it with 
gusto as a fruit that " when it waxeth ripe the meat which filleth 
the rind of the cod becometh yellow and is exceedingly sweet and 
pleasant." 

' The record- keeper ot John Hawkins' expeditions. 

T 



274 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The banana was but one of many things, by the bye, which 
excited the admiration of the curious who came into these parts. 
The alligators of Jamaica — which are still to be found plentifully 
enough in the Black River — much interested the men of the sea. 
" Among these caymans," writes Esquemeling the buccaneer, 
" some are found to be of a corpulency very horrible to the sight." 
(This is noticeable, for the pirate was not easily shocked by what 
he saw.) The same visitor was greatly charmed with certain 
crickets which were " of an extraordinary magnitude, and so full 
of noise that they are ready to burst themselves with singing 
if any person comes near them." 

Many of the animals reported upon by observant adventurers 
are no longer to be found in the island, nor indeed upon the face 
of the globe. Among these is a reptile described by a IFrench 
mariner as " a serpent with three heads and four feet, of the big- 
ness of a great spaniel, which, for want of an arquebus, he durst 
not attempt to slay." But for this unfortunate lack of a weapon 
the Museum of the Louvre might have become possessed of a 
unique natural history specimen of great worth. 

Another extinct animal is a species of wild pig. These pigs 
were seen on the adjacent mainland by no less a person than 
Don Alonzo Enriquez de Guzman.^ They were " somewhat 
smaller than those in Castile," says this precise observer, but were 
peculiar in having " their navels on their backs." Lest any one 
should doubt this anatomical peculiarity in the Caribbean swine, 
the conscientious De Guzman adds " I say this because I have 
seen them ; for I shall tell no lies, because I must give an account 
to God of what you may here read." This is a brave saying of 
the gallant Spaniard, for truth is always precious. 

Wherever may be the point of landing in Jamaica, one of the 
first places to be visited on the island will certainly be Spanish 
Town. This place is about thirteen miles from Kingston, and 
can be reached by rail — but by a back-aching journey— from 
Port Antonio. 

Spanish Town is the old capital of Jamaica. It was founded 

' fjalibiyt Society, 1863. 



SPANISH TOWN. 275 

in 1523, and was known as the City of St. Jago de la Vega. 
When the British came into the possession of the island this name 
was a little more than the ordinary seaman could manage. It 
was gibberish unworthy of any reputable city ; so they called the 
place Spanish Town, and that title it retains to this day. It 
remained the capital and the seat of government until the year 
1 87 1, when the representative of the Crown removed to Kingston 
with his horses, and his men, and his retinue of white-jacketed 
servants. 

Spanish Town was left to its memories. By the banks of the 
Rio Cobre it had leisure to ruminate over the emotions of three 
centuries and a half, during which period the heart of the colony 
beat within its walls. It can look back upon times of terror and 
days of elation, as well as upon many a proud moment when the 
fate of the island hung upon its voice. 

It may be expected that at Spanish Town will be found the 
time-blackened wall, the barbican and the moat, the steep cobble- 
stoned way that leads up by ruffian walls to the castle gate, the 
mumbling lane that creeps bent-backed under the shadow of 
tottering houses, the alcaide's mansion with a well in its court, and 
the blustering quarters of the Spanish guard. There is, however, 
none of this. Spanish Town lies on a flat by the Rio Cobre, 
a little grandmotherly village that is much given to detached 
villas with white walls, ample green shutters, and overgrown 
gardens. Of old Spain there is no trace left. There is no 
encircling rampart, for St. Jago de la Vega now fades im- 
perceptibly into the country. 

It is a small, sweet place, quaint, quiet, and sound asleep. It 
is a village where there is eternal summer ; where the trees are 
always green, where flowers are ever in bloom. Most of the 
houses are of wood, with ash-coloured shingles on the roof; many 
are old, and made exquisite in tint by centuries of sun. All are 
gay with jalousies or verandahs, with balconies or breezy porches, 
for it is hard to keep out the flood of light which pours down upon 
this " level mead." After three centuries of strenuous life Spanish 
Town would seem to have resolved to doze out the rest of its life 



2/6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

in the sun. The clean bright streets are deserted ; the few folk 
who are abroad are limp with a becoming languor ; there is no 
apparent trade in the ancient capital, and no evidence of any 
serious industry or specific occupation. 

The recent earthquake gave an unkind shock to this drowsy 
city, whereby the few houses that are built of brick suffered 
acutely. There is the element of wantonness about this rude 
shaking of Spanish Town. It is as if an opium eater, asleep in a 
field, had been suddenly tossed into the air by a rabid bull. 

The relics of the past grandeur of Spanish Town are to be 
found collected together in a central square. The square prac- 
tically constitutes the metropolis, since outside the enclosure 
there are merely rustic suburbs. The square is a curious and 
unexpected place. Among negro huts, palm trees and tropical 
bungalows is introduced the prudish market-place of a small 
provincial town in England. It is emphatically a genteel square, 
yet severe and parochial. In the centre is just such a garden, 
within iron railings, as would be proper to Bloomsbury. On one 
side is the House of Assembly, with a long colonnade of brick 
arches, of a type to be met with in the Tunbridge Wells or the 
Buxton of bygone days. So suggestive is the whole place of 
a spa, that this building will be at once pronounced by visitors to 
be the pump room. 

Opposite to the House of Assembly is the King's house, which 
building was, until recent years, the official residence of the 
governor. It has all the chastened features of the provincial town 
hall, white pillars supporting a heavy portico, a solemn front door, 
and such windows as should adorn the parlour of a mayor. It has 
no affectation of exclusiveness, no air of withdrawing itself from 
the vulgar gaze, no carriage drive, no forbidding gates. It stands, 
with friendly condescension, close to the roadway, so close, indeed, 
that little boys can look in at the lower windows by clinging to 
the sills. 

On another flank of the square is Rodney's Memorial. It 
takes the form of an octagonal kiosk, or classic temple, sur- 
mounted by a dome and flanked by a colonnade of Ionic pillars. 




RODNEY S MONUMENT, SPANISH TOWN. 
The damage done by the earthquake will be noticed. 



SPANISH TOWN. 277 

One rather expects to find inside a jet of water pouring from 
a stone, and an old woman, provided with drinking mugs, 
collecting coppers. The statue is by Bacon and is, no doubt, 
worthy of being admired. Rodney is bareheaded and naked to 
the waist. He wears sandals, has a toga hanging from his 
shoulders, and a kilt girt about his loins. His hand rests not 
upon a cutlass but upon a shield. His attempt to assume the 
character of an ancient Roman is not very convincing, for it is 
impossible to mistake the fine, vigorous, British face of the 
redoubtable seaman. In front of him are the two great cannons 
he took frpm the Ville de Paris of which mention has been 
already made (page 176). 

On the remaining side of the square is the Court House, as 
provincial as the rest, surmounted by an old and respectable 
clock tower. The building suggests quarter sessions and sheriffs, 
and it would be quite appropriate if Bumble, with his staff, stood 
on guard at the entry. The whole of this quaint market town 
square is indeed so well in keeping, that one only misses the 
farmers gossiping in the roadway, the yokels, the carriers' carts, 
and the country-women's booths. 

In an indefinite clearing among the suburbs, in the midst of 
the bungalows and the palms, is to be found the English Cathedral. 
It is stated to occupy " one of the oldest ecclesiastical sites in the 
New World," and to have been built upon the foundations of the 
ancient Spanish church of the Red Cross. The structure is large 
and dignified, is cruciform in outline, and is furnished with a tower 
capped by a white steeple of wood. It is built of red bricks which 
have faded, in the progress of years, to a dainty rose-colour. A 
tablet states that the tower was thrown down by a hurricane in 
17 1 2, and was re-erected two years later. Around it, in a garden- 
like burial ground, is a host of ancient tombs, many of which are 
now ruinous. The main building, especially the south transept, 
has been seriously damaged by the earthquake. 

This venerable church is the Westminster Abbey of Jamaica. 
The memorials which crowd its walls tell in stone the history of 
the island, for here all the great folk of the colony were buried for 



2/8 THE CRADLE OF XHE DEEP. 

many a century. Here lie the makers of Jamaica as well as its 
martyrs, governors and their consorts, generals and sea captains, 
judges, advocates and doctors, young subalterns and little children. 
They come from all parts of England and of Scotland, as well as 
from the " Kingdom of Ireland." Many of the monuments are 
exquisite and indeed passing beautiful, especially those carved by 
the chisel of John Bacon, the Royal Academician. 

These tablets and cenotaphs are rich with coats of arms, with 
copious poetry, with classic urns, with untempered eulogy. They 
all breathe, however, that poignant tenderness which clings to the 
memory of those who died in exile. Saddest of all is it to note 
how many of those remembered died at sea, " going home." 




SPANISH TOWN — ONE OF COMTE DE GRASSE'S GUNS FROM THE 
" VILLE DE PARIS," TAKEN BY RODNEY, 1782. 




A STREET IN SPANISH TOWN. 



LV. 

KINGSTON IN RUINS. 

I REACHED Kingston less than a month after the disastrous earth- 
quake, travelling from Port Antonio by train across the island. 
On approaching the capital we looked out anxiously for signs of 
ruin, bift there was nothing noteworthy to be seen along the line. 
From what could be observed, as the train ran into the terminus, 
the station itself would seem to be uninjured. There was the 
usual disorder on the platform incident to the arrival of the chief 
train of the day. Without, in the glare of the sun, were the 
familiar rabble of a station yard, the crowd of carts and of cabs, 
the yelling drivers, the importunate boys. One almost expected 
to find the people preoccupied, if not lachrymose or destitute- 
looking, but there was just the bustling, amiable crowd as it had 
been any day for the last ten years. 

We jumped into a buggy, and told the man to get out of the 
hubbub and drive through the town. In a moment we were in a 
death-like silence and in a scene of blank desolation. The road 
was so thick with fine dust that the wheels of the buggy and the 
horse's hoofs made no sound. There was hardly a living soul in 
sight. The change was astounding. It can only be appreciated 
by those who have escaped from the rattle and chaos of the rail- 
way station at Venice to find themselves in a gondola, dazed by 
the stillness of the Grand Canal. 

The destruction in the part of the city which we had entered 
was complete, for what the earthquake had left the fire demolished. 
It seemed as if the man on the steamer at Trinidad had spoken 
truth when he said that Kingston no longer existed. The 
roads had been cleared, but no attempt of any kind had been 



28o THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

made at even a casual restoration. Almost as strange as the 
silence was the greyness of the scene, the absence of all colour, 
the sense of a desert of pale stone. With it too was the unwonted 
light, for as all the roofs and upper stories had vanished, and as 
many of the houses were left no higher than a garden wall, the 
city seemed bared to the heavens, bared to its very bones and 
whitened ribs. The impression of desolation was more absolute 
than that presented by the ruins of St. Pierre, for there creepers 
and weeds had covered the waste, and had smoothed the edges 
of jagged walls. 

Let the Londoner imagine himself standing at the point where 
the great thoroughfares of Regent Street and Oxford Street inter- 
sect. Let him conceive those streets silent, empty of human 
beings, and covered deep with white dust as if with snow. Let 
him picture the houses, as far as the eye could stretch, in ruins, 
roofless and windowless, crushed down to the height of some 
dozen feet, mere pens of stone filled with charred rubbish ; and 
then let him realise that this desolation extended on all sides over 
an area of nearly sixty acres, and he will appreciate how Kingston 
appeared to those who knew it as a place once bristling with 
affairs and astir with life. 

There hung above the town at the time a mist of dust, horrible 
to breathe, and with it drifted, how and then, a loathsome smell 
which was not merely that of smouldering d6bris. 

Over the heaps of bricks and stone along the street would be 
trailing a tangled network of wires, as if some dreadful bramble, 
with stalks and tendrils of iron, was crawling across the place when 
its leaves were blasted into dust. Among the chaos are lamp- 
posts, aimless rain-water pipes, the iron pillars of a long arcade, 
girders and rods, the railings of a balcony the fragment of an iron 
stair. 

The ample roofs of corrugated iron, so common in these parts, 
have taken to themselves strange shapes. In one place a mighty 
plate, fifty feet wide, coiled up into a cone, covers the ruin in 
the manner of a tent. In another spot a long drooping sheet, 
stretched over many walls looks like a dragon's wing. Some 



KINGSTON IN RUINS. 281 

of the forlorn wrecks of houses seem to have wrapped themselves 
round with a covering of this iron as with a cloak. From one 
building the metal roof has been twisted off by the fire and 
dropped on end among the stones, where it stands like some 
hideous cactus sprouting in the wilderness. Along the wharves 
sheets of corrugated iron strew the ground in drifts like heaped- 
up autumn leaves. At a few points are charred trees, rising stiff 
and rnetallic-looking against the sky. They make a fitting 
perching place for the carrion crows who still watch the ruins 
hungrily. 

All the individuality of the various houses is blotted out. 
In one court, half choked with bricks, is the skeleton of a buggy, 
suggesting that the place in which it stands was once a coach- 
house. A mass of blackened goods, pots, pans, and saws, indicate 
an ironmonger's shop, a holocaust of broken bottles marks a beer 
store. Still on one house front is the placard " Gents' Ties," while 
to a scorched wall hangs by one nail a plaque with the inscription 
" Try our Cooler." 

The streets at night, when lit only by the light of the moon, 
are veritable streets of the dead. There are no lamps of any kind 
by the roadside. Each causeway is slashed by the shadows of 
notched walls so black and sharply cut that they lie on the white 
paths as if inlaid in jet. Within the roofless houses are other 
shadows that take the shape of crouching figures, or the semblance 
of upstretched arms ; while a pillar with a wire dangling from it 
throws on the cross roads the black outline of a gibbet. 

The ways are silent, muffled by the ashy dust. One dares 
only speak in a whisper. There is not a living creature to be 
seen in the ghostly lanes except a prowling dog or some scurrying 
rats, for the negro shuns the gaunt city after the sun has set. He 
fears to see spectral women grubbing for their dead among the 
stones, and to hear the stifled cries of those who still lie buried 
beneath the ruins. 

Beyond the burned area and in . the suburbs, although the 
earthquake has been as destructive, there is less the sense of utter 
annihilation. There are here the movement and colour of life, 



282 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

signs of human occupation and the companionship of gardens and 
green trees. The mango is breaking into blossom, and the lignum 
vitae is covered with flowers of a deep forget-me-not blue. Once 
more there are definite days in the week ; once more the routine 
of existence, so abruptly checked, is moving unconcernedly. 

Some of the houses and villas are mere shapeless heaps, 
represented by a roof lying flat on a lawn, a roof from under whose 
eaves has poured forth on every side a cascade of bricks. There is 
not a house still standing that does not show sinuous cracks, like 
streaks of lightning, down its sides, bulging walls, a missing 
portico, or a medley of debris in its just vacated rooms. 

In many an instance the front or side wall of the house has 
fallen away from the building, revealing the rooms, floor by floor, 
just as a doll's house is exposed when its hinged front is thrown 
back. Here every intimate corner from the attic to the cellar, 
from the drawing-room to the black cook's bedroom, is open to 
the eyes of inquisitive neighbours. The curious can see how an 
acquaintance's guest room was papered, and how well or ill it was 
kept. 

The bedstead is in place, its mosquito curtains are undisturbed, 
while a mass of plaster weighs down the tidy coverlet. The 
pictures swing on the wall, but at strange angles ; there are clothes 
on a peg ; one drawer of a chest of drawers has slid open, as the 
house rocked over, and none have ventured to close it. The bed- 
room door is ajar; it leads out to the fragment of a staircase pendent 
in the open air. In a lower room the table is heaped up with 
wreckage, but the tablecloth is just as the neat hands of the house- 
wife left it. Heavy joists have crushed through the sofa, while 
among the pile of rubbish are an overturned rocking-chair, a 
lamp and some children's toys. The upper floor of the dwelling 
drops into the basement room like the lid of a box. A window 
blind flaps from the shred of a casement. An electric light hangs 
into a room that has no floor and only two walls. To some 
wrecks of houses balconies are clinging, impotent and crazy, but 
still covered with creepers. 

The statue of Queen Victoria, near the public gardens, shows 



KINGSTON IN RUINS. 283 

a curious effect of the disturbance. The immense mass of marble 
with its heavy pedestal has been shaken like a glass on a shelf, 
and so rotated upon its plinth that the figure, otherwise uninjured, 
faces in a different direction. 

The venerable Parish Church of Kingston presents an astound- 
ing appearance. This picturesque old building of red brick has 
already escaped four disastrous conflagrations, each one of which 
laid low the town,'^ and now, remarkable enough, the fire was stayed 
within a few yards of its doors. The square tower is surmounted 
by a wooden steeple, which is so tilted upon its base that it is a 
wonder it does not topple over into the graveyard. 

The tower itself shows ragged breaches in its walls as if it had 
been battered by a nine-inch gun. The arches of its windows 
have fallen out, while through the gaping cracks in its sides it is 
possible to see the belfry ropes and the bells. 

Within the church is a scene of incredible ruin. The east wall 
of the chancel having dropped away the altar and its sombre 
reredos are now in the open air. The great stone pillars of the 
nave are cracked and twisted out of the straight, as if some Titanic 
Samson had clasped them in his fury. The ceiling of the coved 
roof has fallen down, leaving bare the laths and beams. Through 
gashes in the walls it is possible to see into the street. Where 
windows stood are huge cavernous openings above a pile of glass. 
The chancel rails are a line of splinters. The pews, except in a 
few places, have been crushed to the ground by falling stones, by 
masses of plaster and ponderous timbers. 

The fine old monuments and tablets which cover the aisles 
have been, for the most part, shaken to fragments. Some have 
fallen among the general wreckage, while others are still holding 
to the masonry in disjointed pieces. The floor is a wild, heaped- 
up waste of stones, mortar, stained glass, dust and bricks, mingled 
with splinters of pews, roof planks, hassocks, cushions, lamps and 
hymn books. 

Conspicuous among the debris were two curious things — a 
girl's bright-coloured paper fan, and a white death's head in marble, 

' The great fires of 1780, 1S43, 1S62 and 1882. 



284 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

which had dropped from one of the memorials on the wall and 
was grinning from out of the dust. 

Perched aloft above this dismal wreckage, high on the summit 
of the steeple and looking ever across the ruins of the forlorn city, 
is the golden weather-cock, still bright, valiant and cheery. As 
it swings contentedly in the path of the breeze, it makes the one 
gleam of gold against the dust-clouded sky. 



LVI. 

A RECORD OF TEN SECONDS. 

Kingston ; Monday, January 14, 1907, at 3,30 P.M. Such were 
the day and the hour. The afternoon was sunny and hot ; a faint 
breeze was astir and the town was languidly busy. 

Suddenly there hissed through the streets the sound of a 
rushing mighty wind. Folk looked up at palm trees near by, 
expecting to see them bowed to the ground, but they remained 
unshaken. 

With the phantom wind came a direr sound, a noise of some- 
thing advancing with the fury of an avalanche, a sound the most 
portentous and unforgettable that the world knows. Those who 
speak of it compare it feebly to the rumble of a crowd of waggons 
tearing on at a gallop, to the rush of uncountable horsemen, 
to the hollow roaring of a train in a tunnel, to the bursting 
of a great river. 

At the same moment the whole solid earth was shaken 
violently and viciously, so that men were thrown about like 
puppets. Then followed the appalling crash and clatter of 
a thousand falling houses, a burst of screams that rent the 
heavens, and the uprising into the air of a column of yellow 
dust. 

For a moment after there fell upon the place a stupefying 
silence. Those who remember it say that this interval of still- 
ness was the most tragic feature in the whole dread episode. 

In ten seconds a town of 46,000 inhabitants had become 
a ruin, while some hundreds of its people were lying dead or 
dying beneath its wreckage. Only ten seconds ! and yet the 
call of the many had been " Will it never stop ? " 



286 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Details of the catastrophe, gained from various sources, help 
to complete the picture of what happened in this fateful fraction 
of a minute. An officer on a steamer by the quay heard the 
weird wind, felt the ship shaken as by an explosion, and then, 
looking ashore, saw the long wharf rock up and down as thin 
ice rocks over a wave, saw people thrown to the ground and 
others in strange attitudes trying to keep their balance, leaning 
forwards as men caught in a hurricane, leaning back as men 
in peril on a slope, standing with legs wide apart or clinging 
to posts and bollards. The great buildings swayed to and fro. 
Then came the din of falling walls, with the rattle of an acre 
of corrugated iron tumbling from roofs — whereupon the scene 
was immediately blotted out by dust. 

A lady driving in the suburbs felt her carriage lifted up and 
shaken like a toy ; the horses, staggering to and fro, seemed at one 
moment to be straining up hill and at another to be hurrying 
down a dip in the road. She heard a roar in the town like that 
of far-off artillery, and saw the yellow cloud rise slowly up into 
the sky. 

An officer in his bungalow, dressing for tennis, felt the house 
roll like a ship in the sea, saw the door swing open by itself, 
found himself hurled through the opening and cast headlong 
down the stair. On reaching the garden he looked up at the 
building, to find the whole front wall fallen to the earth, and 
his wife standing in her bedroom by the dressing-table, on what 
seemed a mere film of a floor, dazed and looking down at him with 
vacant eyes. She appeared as if standing in an ascending lift. 

A gentleman, paying an afternoon call, perceived the house 
being tilted from its foundations. He and his hostess rushed 
through an open window into the garden and fell to the ground. 
They rose, clung to one another but fell again, and as they heard 
the building come down behind them, crawled away on their 
hands and knees to the shelter of some bushes. 

A party of gentlemen meeting in a hall heard the roar, felt the 
floor rock so that those near a table clung to it with both hands, 
but realised little until the ceiling began to fall and until they 



A RECORD OF TEN SECONDS. 287 

saw the sunlit street through cracks in the wall. They gained the 
door, but one — such is the force of habit — walked back quietly for 
his hat and umbrella. 

It was in the crowded streets of the business quarter that the 
din, the medley, and the fright were most acute. Many have 
very little idea what precisely happened or what they saw or did. 
One man visiting a shop found himself shaken up with the general 
goods of the store as if he and they were loose things in a box. 
He has a recollection of making for the door, of finding it blocked 
with barrels of flour, over which he crawled, noting incidentally 
that a screaming girl — whom he had never seen before — was 
clinging to his coat tails. In the street he found himself enveloped 
in a yellow fog, which shut out everything but the crackling and 
crunching of tumbling walls. 

It was not always easy to escape into the street. A young 
woman in an upper room, finding the door jammed, jumped out 
of the window into a tree by the path, and before she could be 
helped down the entire building had collapsed. A lad was come 
upon hanging to the window sill of a house which was already 
roofless and floorless. Frantic people staggered down staircases 
which rolled from side to side like the companion-way of a ship. 
They clutched at the hand-rail, but it dropped out of their hands. 
They took one further step and fell into a pit of ruin, the stair 
having vanished. 

One man who ran out into the road received his first realisation 
of the nature of the calamity by happening upon the body of a 
woman cut nearly in two by a sheet of corrugated iron, the sharp 
edge of which had fallen upon her like a hatchet. 

In the streets, filled as they were with a yellow fog of dust, the 
scene was paralysing and uninterpretable. On all sides was the 
cannonading of crumbling houses : bricks came down like rain ; 
walls were rent as if made of paper ; the great timbers of a floor 
snapped like a bundle of sticks ; telegraph poles swayed as reeds 
in a wind. Negroes blubbering with panic were filling the waste 
with howls and groans ; men, hatless, coatless, smothered with 
dust and streaming with blood, moved aimlessly to and fro. 



288 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 

Among the turmoil a stupefied man stood alone, carefully brush- 
ing a little mortar from his hat. Now and then a strong voice 
would call out steadily, " Look out for that wall ! " or " Keep clear 
of the wires ! " 

Men, trying to escape by streets they no longer knew, scram- 
bled over heaps of stones, as shipwrecked mariners climb over 
rocks. They stumbled across dead horses and men and the 
poured out contents of shops, found themselves trapped in 
entanglements of wire, clung to by lost children or trampled upon 
by other frantic folk who were tearing to the open. 

Many a heap of dust could be seen to move, for beneath it was 
a living man. More than one poor wretch, buried to the waist 
among the ruins, was held there until the fire swept down upon 
him and silenced his yells. If there came a lull it was broken by 
a fresh shaking of the earth and the renewed terror of riven walls 
and clattering stones. 

In twenty minutes the town was ablaze, so that, as the night 
fell, the scene closed with the glare of fire and the roar of 
on-rushing flames. 



LVII. 

ADMIRAL JOHN BENBOW. 

In the old Parish Church of Kingston there lies buried Admiral 
John Benbow. His grave, near by the chancel rails, is covered 
with a large black stone, embellished with a coat of arms. At 
the time of my visit this stone was hidden by the wreckage of the 
earthquake, but it was not difficult to find an unemployed negro 
who, with some little labour, laid it bare. The stone presents the 
following unpunctuated inscription : 

Here lyeth Interred the 
< Body of Iohn Benbow 

Esq Admiral of the White 

A true Pattern of English 

Courage who Lost his life 

In Defence of His Queene 

and Country November ye 4™ 

1702 In the 52*™ year of 

His Age by a wound of his Legg 

Receiud in an Engagement 

with Mons'' Du Casse Being 

Much Lamented. 

The circumstance under which this admiral of the White 
received the " wound of his legg " belongs to " the story of one of 
the most painful and disgraceful episodes in the history of the 
British Navy." ^ The British and the French were, as was not 
unusual, at war. The campaign was that same war of the Spanish 
Succession which is associated with the name of Marlborough, and 
with the famous battles of Blenheim and Ramillies, Benbow 
found himself opposed in the West Indies by a French fleet under 
' The Royal Navy, by Sir William Laird Clowes, vol. ii. page 372: London, 1897. 

U 



290 



THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



the command of Admiral Du Casse. The British battleships were 
collected together at Port Royal, and on July ii, 1702, the 
admiral set sail from that port in search of the enemy. He came 
up with the French on August 19, off Santa Marta, a cape on the 
Spanish Main between La Hache and Cartagena. The English 
mail steamers pass close to this point of land and through the 
very waters which were the scene of the engagement. 

The French force consisted of five line-of-battle ships and four 
smaller craft. The composition of the English fleet is of some 
interest in view of what happened. 

Ship. Guns. Commander. 

Breda . . 70 Benbow. 

De*fiance , . 64 Kirkby. 

Windsor . . 60 Constable. 

Greenwich . 54 Wade. 

Pendennis . . 48 Hudson. 

Falmouth . . not stated Vincent. 

Ruby . • 5» » Walton. 



The fight began on August 21. It was a remarkable engage- 
ment, a running fight which was maintained for no less than four 
days, in which the Breda was practically left alone to do battle in 
the "defence of her Queene and country." The captains of the 
leading English vessels declined to come into touch with the 
French. In spite of urgent orders from the flagship they 
remained aloof. Although thus meanly deserted John Benbow 
fought on with bulldog obstinacy. He pounded away until his 
cannon were nearly red hot. He hung on to the enemy until 
spar after spar was carried away, until his sails were in holes, and 
his bulwarks jagged like a saw's edge. He would hear of no 
giving in, although his men were dropping from fatigue and 
although the carpenter continued to report a rising of water in the 
hold. 

During the darkness of the night of the 23rd he was busy 
trying to repair some of the damage done, but as soon as there 
was light enough in the morning he was at the French again. 



ADMIRAL JOHN BENBOW. 291 

The cannonading had not long begun when the admiral's right leg 
was smashed by a chain-shot, and he was carried unconscious to 
his cabin. When he came to himself, he ordered his cot to be 
brought up the companion-way and placed on the quarter-deck, 
and here, from his bed, he gave orders for the fighting to be 
pressed on with to the end. 

The end soon came. The odds were hopeless. The Breda, 
deserted by her consorts, was so fearfully mauled as to be almost 
a wreck, and it seemed doubtful if she had yards and sails enough 
left to carry her back to port. The admiral at last gave the order 
to rfetire to Port Royal, and sullenly withdrew from the enemy's 
fire. 

It was a memorable episode ; the Breda, splintered and torn, 
creeping away to the north slowly, like a grievously wounded man 
who will not own that he is beaten. Behind were the French 
shouting with derision. Far away on the horizon were the craven 
British ships slinking home like a pack of whipped curs. On the 
deck of the Breda was the admiral, lying on his cot, white with 
loss of blood, almost blind from shock, but still able to curse the 
French, to curse his captains, and above all to curse the chain-shot 
that had prevented him from keeping on with the fight. Still 
flying above him, at the masthead of the Breda, was the order for 
a general attack, a command to which only the gallant Ruby had 
responded. 

The Breda reached Kingston Harbour in the course of time, 
and there the wounded admiral was taken ashore. The leg was 
amputated. There is little doubt but that septicaemia super- 
vened and that it involved a long and distressing illness, for the 
obstinate old fighter did not die until November 4, seventy-two 
days after the wound had been received. 

As he fought alone, so he seems to have lived alone, for he was 
an unlovable man. He is described as rough and off-hand in his 
manner, very ready to bully his subordinates, and very unready to 
make friends of those who chanced to be his shipmates. 

On October 8, 1702, Captains Kirkby, Constable, and Wade 
were tried by court-martial on the charges of "cowardice, 



292 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

disobedience to orders, and neglect of duty." Hudson, of the 
Pendennis, would have been indicted with the other prisoners, but 
he died before the court commenced. Vincent, of the Falmouth, 
was put on his trial for minor offences, more or less discreditable. 
The only officer of the fleet who came out of this affair with 
other than disgrace was George Walton, the loyal captain of the 
Ruby. 

As a result of the court-martial, Kirkby and Wade were 
sentenced to death, and were shot at Plymouth. Constable was 
cashiered, and thrown into prison, where shortly after he died. 
Vincent was suspended. Walton was probably forgotten. So 
ended a miserable business, which has happily no parallel in the 
glorious annals of the British Navy. 




PORT KOYAL. 
End of Chapel wrecked by Earthquake. 




FORT CHARLES, PORT ROYAL. 



LVIII. 

PORT ROYAL AS IT WAS. 

Beautiful indeed in its setting is the little sea town of Port 
Royal. It stands far away from the land, a speck on the deep, at 
the very mouth of Kingston Harbour. This may not seem to be 
a long way off, but then Kingston Harbour is so wide from shore 
to shore as to be almost an inland sea. Or rather may it be com- 
pared to the haze-environed Venetian lagoon, which it resembles 
in its stillness and in the curious lantern-lit posts which mark the 
shoal-water channel. Rowing out along that channel recalls the 
lazy passage from Venice to Torcello. The names of the points 
that the boat idles by are not so sweet-sounding perhaps, since 
such titles as Devil's Cay, Hulk Hole and Gallows Point lack the 
graciousness of those waterways which lead to the Bridge of Sighs. 
The gorilla-faced negro, moreover, who grins at the oars is a sorry 
substitute for the gondolier. 

The town in question is attached to Jamaica by a curved line 
of low land, some eight miles long, a mere thread of the solid 
earth lying in the blue sea as the sickle of a new moon swims in the 
sky. It is a thin crescent of malachite green edged with a rim of 
old gold. The green is a medley of bushes and palms, the margin 
of gold is a sandy beach. The palms half-way out in the lagoon 
are marshalled in an orderly row, like stakes in a flooded meadow, 
and thus it is that the far-venturing breakwater is called the 
Palisades. 

At the very end of the curve is the little round town of Port 
Royal, like the eye of a peacock's feather on the tip of a plume. 
So flimsy is the line of the Palisades that Port Royal, when viewed 
from Kingston, may be an island whose connection with the main- 



294 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

land has been well-nigh dissolved into the deep. Indeed, when 
the sun is at high noon and there is a glamour on the sea the grey 
walls and pointed trees that mark the spot become so unsubstantial 
in the blinding light that they seem to belong to the air-borne 
city of a mirage. 

On the day of my visit there was just such a brilliant calm as 
Michael Scott has described, when " the anchorage was one un- 
broken mirror, and the reflection of the vessel was so clear and 
steady that at the distance of a cable's length you could not 
distinguish the water-line, nor tell where the substance ended and 
the shadow began, until the casual dashing of a bucket overboard 
for a few moments broke up the phantom ship ; but the wavering 
fragments soon reunited, and she again floated double." ^ 

On the land side of the harbour is the generous green plain 
upon which Kingston stands, a plain rich in trees, as gentle to 
look at as an English water-meadow, yet undermined with treachery 
and despair as befits the plain of the City of Destruction. Beyond 
the flat are the hills, and yet farther away the imperious sweep 
of the Blue Mountains — gentian-blue where they meet the clouds, 
fustian-brown where they spurn the earth. They form the walls 
of that heartless amphitheatre, the stepped slopes of that 
Coliseum which looked down upon the arena where 40,000 human 
beings have just battled with Death. 

Port Royal in Stuart times, when the pirates came there, was — 
in electrical parlance — a " live " town. It had the credit of being 
the wickedest spot on earth within the knowledge of civilised men. 
Its reputation in this particular was unassailable. Whatever was 
pre-eminent in iniquity — especially in the department of riotous 
living — that Port Royal was the master of The fervent mission- 
ary could have found no richer "field of work" than was presented 
by this unholy place. Any advocate of temperance who was 
eager to snatch brands from the burning would have found here 
luxuriant material. Cities famous for depravity are commonly 
described either as " sinks of iniquity " or as " hot-beds of crime." 
Port Royal was neither the one nor the other. Its wickedness was 

' Tom Cringle's Leg. 



PORT ROYAL AS IT WAS. 295 

flamboyant, defiant and unabashed, with, it must be owned, a 
touch of picturesqueness about it. It covered the once dull fisher 
town with a blaze of scarlet, just as the tropical Bougainvillea 
will rollick over a homely tree, until it has hidden the prudish 
boughs to the very summit beneath the mantle of its crimson 
leaves. 

This reckless settlement might have been present in the minds 
of the devout men who wrote the Litany in the Book of Common 
Prayer, since they have so precisely enumerated its particular 
faults and failings. It must needs have own^ed, for example, to 
a general knowledge of " all evil and mischief," as well as to an 
acquaintance with the " crafts and assaults of the devil." It could 
claim to be familiar not only with " battle, murder and sudden 
death," but also with " plague, pestilence and famine." It had 
experienced the ills of " lightning and tempest," and had suffered 
not a little from " sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion." Two 
charges, on the other hand, it would certainly have repudiated, 
those, namely, of " hypocrisy " and " all uncharitableness." 

Port Royal must have been a stirring spot for a number of 
years, and especially during the latter half of the seventeenth 
century. It was girt about by a wall with many a sally-port in it, 
while upon its point rose a grey lighthouse. It had wide quays, 
whereon were often to be seen piled-up bales and kegs, sacks 
crammed with spices and boxes full of pieces of eight, the same 
being guarded by mahogany-coloured men with cutlasses and 
with such truculent looks as would alone have daunted the very 
emissaries of Satan. 

There were ample creeks too for careening ships and a " hard " 
for the boats as handy as that at Portsmouth. Here would be drawn 
up craft of all kinds, whale-boats and jolly-boats, boats stolen from 
Spanish merchantmen, native canoas and weather-worn Plymouth 
wherries. Around them would be loitering listless men, lean and 
in rags, prisoners from the Main, who muttered together in the 
hated speech of Spain. They would be watched by a contented 
coxswain who, lying half asleep in the sun, with his back against 
a wall, would heave a stone at them occasionally when their 



296 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

jabber jarred on his reverie. Conspicuous on the outskirts of the 
port, and standing high upon a spit of green, was a gallows with 
a few festering bodies dangling from it. 

Houses of all shapes and heights crowded together along the 
narrow streets of the town. Some were mere huts thatched with 
palm leaves ; others were of wood with seaward-looking balconies ; 
many were built of stone with turrets or bright-tiled roofs. 
There were churches too in the place and warehouses, a fort and 
the lines of a military barrack, ship-chandlers' shops in great 
abundance smelling of tarred rope, and shops full of tawdry 
jewelry, mostly ear-rings and finger-rings, with silks and mantillas 
destined for lasses in Devon, together with strange birds in cages 
and a stuffed alligator or two. 

Slaves trundling casks along the cobbled road would be 
brought to a stop by a hatless mariner lying full length in the 
path, with no sign of life in him beyond an occasional bubble of 
unintelligible speech that issued from his baggy lips. Now and 
then a string of purple-faced revellers would lurch by, arm in arm, 
rolling to and fro like linked beacons in a choppy sea, bellowing 
as they went the refrain of a ballad learnt ten years ago in 
England. In a by- lane might be seen a Jew haggling with a 
sailor over the price of a crucifix, and in a dark corner, near by, 
the lank corpse of a man who had died of yellow fever. 

From the taverns would issue a cloud of brandy-tainted smoke 
and the roar of hurricane voices, blended with the clatter of 
tankards, the chink of money and the occasional crash of a fist 
falling on a table. From other houses may come the sound of a 
fiddle and of men dancing in heavy boots. In the shadows of 
the gambling shanties sailors would be throwing dice or playing at 
Red and White in an ominous silence. It was a silence that was 
apt to be broken by shouts and snarling, or even by a pistol shot, 
or by the noise of a man stumbling out into the daylight coughing 
up blood. 

It was probably in the cabins of ships in the anchorage, rather 
than in the town, that the serious business of Port Royal was 
transacted. Imagine such a cabin at night about the time of the 



PORT ROYAL AS IT WAS. 297 

middle watch, a low, stifling cuddy with smoke-blackened beams. 
A sail has been drawn over the skylight as a guard against 
prying eyes. The room is lit by a guttering tallow candle stuck 
in an altar candlestick. It throws its light upon a chart on the 
table, over which some half-dozen men are leaning. It casts 
awful shadows of their mighty shoulders and of their battered 
hats upon the panelled walls, upon the shelves where gleam silver- 
mounted pistols, upon the half-opened locker stuffed with loot 
and odd gear, together with the portrait of a wife at home and the 
withered bunch of holly she hung up in the cabin when the ship 
left Plymouth one Christmas Day. A cage with a parrot hangs 
somewhere in the gloom, for out of the dark there comes, now and 
then, a cheery and inconsequent shriek of profanity. 

The captain, a man in a brocaded coat, is tracing a course on 
the chart with the point of a dagger. His neighbour follows it 
with a pipe-stem, but a third man, who keeps his mutilated and 
thumbless hand on the paper, insists on an alternative route which 
he indicates with the stump of his one remaining finger. 

The yellow light falls on their faces, so that their features 
show up as luminous points in the mirk, like prominent parts of 
a grotesque carving, the bridge of a nose, a scarred cheek, a lined 
forehead with a lock of hair hanging over it, a bared throat. The 
eyes of the chart readers, their heavy moustaches and shaggy 
beards, are all lost in the mysterious shadow. 

They are deep over a scheme for a raid on the Main ; they 
argue and wrangle in hot whispers, until the captain's clenched 
fist comes down on the paper with a concluding thud. The last 
troubled point they decide by a throw of the dice, and then, stand- 
ing up, they stretch their shoulders, shake hands solemnly, and yell 
up the stair for a cannikin of hot rum. 

Such was Port Royal when it was shaken into ruins by the 
fearful earthquake of 1692, when the indignant sea rose and swept 
down upon it with revengeful waves, when white-crested combers 
bellowed along the polluted streets, broke through the tavern 
doors, overturned the tables of the money-changers, and swept the 
whole fabric of iniquity into the eddying and relentless deep. 



298 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



LIX. 

PORT ROYAL AS IT IS. 

The Port Royal of to-day is a small, bright place, brilliant with 
many trees, trim lawns and white walls, yet possessed with a 
certain air of melancholy as of a spot which has been deserted and 
forgotten. 

It is divided into two parts — the official quarter on the point 
of land, and the town which stands deferentially behind it, where 
Port Royal joins the Palisades. The importance of Port Royal 
as a naval and military station is now so small that the navy has 
abandoned it, while the army clings to the place more, it would 
seem, for the sake of old memories than for any tactical reason 

The official quarter is very orderly and neat with a good deal 
of the drear severity of the barrack square about it, the same 
being, however, relieved by leisurely palm trees, by pretty gardens 
around the officers' houses, and hy that outbreak of irresponsible 
green which wzll assert itself in the tropics. 

The earthquake has wrought woeful damage • in the place. 
A number of the stolid, stand-at-attention war office buildings 
have tumbled to the ground, while others are leaning over with 
all the recklessness of a drunken man on parade. There are 
gaping fissures in austere, official squares, as if the earth were 
yawning disrespectfully ; concrete walls and floors have been 
cracked like eggshells. The little ammunition railway seems 
to have taken fright, for it wriggles about like a fleeing snake, 
while at one place its rails have leapt desperately into the air, 
carrying their sleepers with them. Rigid and well-disciplined 
paths roll up and down with the exuberance of a switchback 
at a fair. The immaculate flag-staff" is heeling over like 





■l.^f^-* 



FORT CHARLES, PORT ROYAL. 
Entrance to Nelson's Quarters. 



PORT ROYAL AS IT IS. 299 

a sentinel asleep, and a guard-room, which should be a model 
of propriety, shows a wide gaping door which appears to be 
grinning with laughter. 

The very apex of the spit of land has sunk into the deep, 
so that out at sea the ragged heads of palm trees can be seen 
just projecting above the water, as if they had gone a-bathing. 
In the sea, but nearer to what remains of the land, are iron 
railings, landing stages and melancholy sheds, which, being more 
or less submerged, look as if they had attempted to drown them- 
selves when the panic seized them. One substantial barrack 
is quite sound in appearance when viewed from the outside, 
but within it is a mass of ruin, every ceiling and partition having 
been shaken down just as if it had suffered — as indeed it had — 
from a fearful rigor. The new fort, the indestructible precipice- 
walled fort, has been tumbled about ignominiously ; its massive 
masonry is cracked like a potsherd, while the whole fabric is 
so much askew that it looks as if seen through a distorting 
mirror. 

The saddest wreck is that of the grand old Naval Hospital, 
a good-natured, comforting, motherly building, standing in 
a mature garden as like an English garden as the handy man 
could make it This kindly hostel, rich in tender associations, 
has been damaged grievously by the sinking of its foundations. 

Nearer to the Palisades is the Naval Yard, a fascinating 
and picturesque place, breezy and sailor-like, and full of those 
quarter-deck fancies without which no mariner, it would seem, 
can abide the land. Here are fine, echoing store-houses for 
ropes and blocks, buildings with ample grey roofs and the green 
dormer windows of a pilot's cottage, sail lofts and hammock lofts, 
stiffly disposed guns, a white flag-staff of course, a lawn such as 
Drake may have played bowls on, with the figure-head of an 
old wooden ship at each corner of it, rusty anchors, a boat slip, 
weedy and damp, with only a windlass and a heap of chain to 
keep it company. 

It is all very salt and hearty, but the great sheds — once full 
of casks, sea chests, spars and tackle, and once reverberating 



300 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

with the shouts of men fitting out for home — are now empty and 
silent The tide still rises and falls on the steps. It dallies over 
the stones, whispering like a siren. The tempting breeze steals 
through the bare sail lofts, as if it were a blind thing searching 
with outstretched hands. The far-away sea flashes its lure of 
blue in the sun, but there is no response : no boat puts out from 
the quay, nor is there heard the answer to the call — the rhyme 
of twelve swinging oars chanting in their rowlocks. 

Probably the most interesting relic in Port Royal is Fort 
Charles, erected in the reign of Charles H. It is a stiff old 
veteran of a fort, built for the most part of sun-faded bricks. A 
ramp leads up to the main gateway, over which is a regal coat of 
arms. Inside the stronghold, and secluded from the world by the 
ponderous wall, are some officers' quarters and a paved court 
This court is so white that when the sun falls upon it, it is 
dazzling almost to blindness, while the shadows of the battlements 
on its flags are as black as ebony. Around it is disposed a quaint 
flower garden of such simplicity as would befit the courtyard of 
a monastery. Flowers of many colours, scarlet, yellow and blue, 
give a daintiness to the place which is unlooked for in a bastion ; 
green weeds crop up among the stones, creepers loll over the wall 
and drop down on the other side, while more than one of the gun 
embrasures are hidden by bushes. It appears to be a favourite 
haunt of birds. Many green lizards, too, flit over the coral- 
coloured brick walls, stopping abruptly now and then as if they 
were listening to sounds inaudible to men. 

On one wall bounding the courtyard is a marble tablet with 
this inscription : 

In this place 

Dwelt 

HORATIO NELSON 

You WHO TREAD HIS FOOTPRINTS 

Remember his glory. 

In a corner of the place is an old guard-room with heavy 
beams in the ceiling. A little stair opens out of it upon a paved 
platform which runs just within the seaward parapet This stone 



PORT ROYAL AS IT IS. 301 

walk is called " Nelson's quarter-deck," for here he paced to and 
fro, watching for the French fleet which was hourly expected to 
attack Port Royal. It was in 1779 when Nelson was in command 
of Fort Charles. He was then just twenty-one years of age. 
The time was one of great anxiety in Jamaica, as the enemy's 
fleet was reported to be of immense strength, while the garrison 
holding this outpost was by comparison insignificant.^ In one 
angle of the fort is a little shy entry or sally-port, leading to a 
stone stair. Over the arch of the gateway are the arms of the 
great admiral painted in sumptuous colours. This is the stair 
which led to Nelson's quarters. 

Nelson had a later experience of Port Royal. He returned 
here in 1780, after the San Juan River expedition, so prostrated by 
dysentery that he had to be carried ashore in his cot. He was 
taken to the lodging of a negress named Cuba Cornwallis. The 
praenomen " Cuba " indicated the market from whence she came 
(just as one would speak of Ceylon tea) ; the title " Cornwallis " 
was added when she received her freedom from slavery at the 
hands of the admiral of that name. She was a nurse with a great 
reputation, a clever and kindly old soul, who kept what would be 
now called a nursing home, for she had had many officers under 
her care. 

This gracious flower-bedecked fortress is the last survivor of 
the Port Royal of ancient days. It has seen the town at the 
height of its tawdry glory ; has seen it slink back again to the 
homely fisher village. It has heard the clamour of revelry rise 
above the bustling streets. It has heard the volley of guns that 
welcomed the captive plate ships from the Main, as well as the 
tolling of the chapel bell for many a thousand of dead men. 
Under the shelter of its walls pirates have plotted at night, while 
possibly in its mess room Morgan the buccaneer, red and 
boisterous, has called for "a health to the King." Unmoved, 
unscathed it passed through the hideous earthquake of 1692, when 
the whole of the town around it was buried in ruin. Unmoved it 
has witnessed thq great catastrophe of 1907, for while the mighty 

* The attack by the French was never made. 



302 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

forts which have supplanted it were crumpled up like a child's 
castle on' the sands, this genial old place of many memories has 
been left undisturbed,^ 

Of the town of Port Royal — the pirates' Babylon — there is 
practically no trace remaining. In its place stands a village of 
narrow streets, shaded by picturesque grey houses of wood. 
Some have spacious balconies and verandahs, while not a few are 
decorated by handsome carvings after the old manner — the work 
of men who graved the figure-heads of ships. There are many 
tiny yards and gardens, as well as paved alleys, which seem to 
withdraw themselves from the gaze of men. Brown nets hanging 
along a paling, and a pair of mariner's trousers asprawl in the sun 
on a hibiscus bush, suggest that some at least of the inhabitants 
follow the calling of fishermen. The rest appear to be living in 
what is called "close retirement." It is a faded, disconsolate 
townlet, respectable almost to melancholy. If it has been too full 
of "evil and mischief" in the past, it is now certainly repenting in 
dust and ashes. 

It still possesses a beautiful old court-house, the insigne of its 
better days. The quaint building has an arcade on either side of 
it, and a roof covered with shingles. The earthquake has shaken 
down the front wall, thereby revealing a curved staircase of great 
solemnity, fashioned in dark wood, which mounts to a landing, 
where are sober official doors which have been unceremoniously 
thrown wide open. 

' The only effect of the recent earthquake was a slight crack in one of its walls. 



LX. 

TOM BOWLING'S CHANTRY. 

The most human building in the town of Port Royal is the old 
church. Viewed from the outside it is small, insignificant and 
ugly, being little more than a cube of plaster standing in a 
disintegrated graveyard. Its outward ugliness is due to the fact 
that it has been " restored," and that the work has been done with 
as much ruthlessness as if it had been a fourteenth-century church 
in England. A tablet announces that it was rebuilt in the years 
1725-6. , 

Within it is happily but little disturbed, owing, it may be 
supposed, to a fortunate lack of funds. Still left standing are the 
old-fashioned pews and benches where many generations of sailor 
men, " grummets " and " younkers," have sat and prayed to be 
preserved " from the dangers of the sea and from the violence of 
the enemy." At one end is a grand wooden singing gallery, held 
up by stout pillars. Its front is very elaborately and strangely 
carved in the Spanish style, the surface of the work being toned 
down by age to a rich port-wine colour. The walls are covered 
with memorials and tablets of every type and period. They tell 
one ever-repeated story — the story of men lost in gales or killed in 
action, of men who sank with their ships, and above all of the host 
who were sacrificed as a tribute to the Minotaur of yellow fever. 
How many thousands of British sailors and soldiers lie buried in 
the sands around Port Royal no chronicle can tell. Those whose 
names still linger on the walls of the ancient church are but a 
mere fraction of the multitude. 

The monuments are erected by widows, by old shipmates, 
by sisters and daughters. There is one to three little middies 



304 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

who died of yellow fever in 1820. The tablet that keeps green 
the memory of their brief lives is placed in the church by their 
captain, who would have found his ship grown strangely quiet 
after the three small coffins were taken ashore. There is a memo- 
rial to a lieutenant aged forty-nine, which will serve to show how 
slow promotion might be half a century ago. It is to a certain 
Lieutenant Bainbridge, of H.M. schooner Pickle^ who perished of 
yellow fever in 1846, and is erected by his shipmates. Another 
tablet tells of a dismal voyage as well as of a doctor and his 
patients. It reads thus : — " Thomas Graham, M.D., and sixteen 
seamen of H.M. ship Pantaloon, who died of fever between Belize 
and Jamaica, 1847." A remarkable monument exists to the 
memory of Lieutenant Stapleton, who was killed in 1754 by 
the bursting of a gun. The carving in white marble representing 
the catastrophe was considered by many to be an achievement 
until Froude disposed of the same by declaring it to be " bad art." 
Port Royal Church is the church of the sailor of bygone days, 
the seamen's chantry where prayers may be offered for the peace 
of their restless souls. Among the many inscriptions upon its 
walls might well appear the opening lines of Dibdin's sea song : 

" Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling, 
The darling of our crew ; 
No more he'll hear the tempest howling, 
For death has broached him to." 

As befits a sailors' chapel it is close to the sea, so near that the 
sound of the waves on the beach can be heard any service time 
when the wind is southerly. 

What a muster of men these fateful walls have seen ! Here, 
in the best pew, stands the staid captain, " in a coat of the regular 
Rodney cut, broad skirts, long waist and stand-up. collar ; " his 
costume being completed by white kerseymere breeches and 
long boots with " coal-scuttle tops." His lips never move through 
the service. He opens his book always at one place, never 
turning a leaf It is the place in the volume where lies a book- 
marker made by a daughter long years dead ; for the old man's 



TOM BOWLING'S CHANTRY. 305 

Sunday service, the year through, consists of a worshipful com- 
munion with memories of the past. 

Here too is the mahogany-faced bo'sun, around whose visage 
is a fringe of hair like a mane, and at the nape of whose neck 
hangs a queue which might be made of a rope's end. He has 
a voice like a fog-horn, a reputation for musical gifts and for 
great powers of song. He will never begin a verse of a hymn 
until he has first drawn the back of his hand across his mouth, 
as if he were about to take a satisfying draught 

Then there are the middies, looking very trim as becomes 
boys fresh from home. They are apt to be pale-faced, and to 
seem a little too frail for the giant-limbed company they find 
themselves among. They wear dirks by their sides, and carry 
in their hands the Prayer Books their mothers gave them. 

The body of the congregation is made up of a rough crowd of 
reckless-looking, masterful men. Most of them wear short 
jackets and white trousers, the latter being maintained in place by 
a wisp of bunting or a strip of sail cloth. Some hold shiny black 
hats in their fists, while most of them drag a lock of hair respect- 
fully over their foreheads as they enter the aisle. They are strong 
in coloured handkerchiefs, in large ear-rings and in ponderous 
boots. They are shy and awkward as they lurch in at the door, 
are inclined to huddle together, and, when their faces are hidden 
in the attitude of prayer, surreptitious jets of tobacco juice may be 
heard to strike the boards. Heads come close together under the 
shelter of the pew wall ; whisperings may at times be exchanged, 
and these may rise into angry murmurs or even to sounds of open 
wrangling, until at last it comes to be known that two of the 
worshippers are rolling on the floor, fighting like hyaenas and 
nearly bursting the panels of the pew with their backs. They 
are removed with as much decorum as the circumstances will 
permit, and the subsequent fight in the graveyard is listened to 
with rapt interest and much nudging of elbows by a critical 
congregation. 

Few in the assembly can read, but all can sing, and sing they 
do till the windows shake. The coxswain waiting by the boats 

X 



306 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

bn the slip must many a time have had the quiet of his watch 
broken in upon by the roar of the "Old Hundredth" pouring 
forth from the church half a mile away. It was well perhaps that 
they could not read, for there was ever before them in the little 
church the dread writing on the wall, a script which told of far-off 
disaster as well as of that shadow of death which left, Sunday 
after Sunday, ever-widening gaps in the benches. 

Let it be hoped that, after the storm and stress of their rugged 
lives, they all found at last — as did Tom Bowling — that never 
clouded land of " pleasant weather," 



LXI 

COLON. 

The homeward journey commences at Jamaica, being made in 
the mail steamer which comes down from New York. The ship 
travels eastwards along the Spanish Main, its earliest port of call 
being Colon on the Isthmus of Panama. The first view of the 
famous Spanish Main is not disappointing. The steamer heads 
for a wide, green bay of many creeks, the low shores of which are 
edged by cocoa-nut palms. In the background is a far-reaching 
ridge covered with jungle. The trees upon its summit stand out 
against the skyline, while to the left are dim mountains of great 
height, the western end of the Andes. The country seems so 
luxuriant and so tempting that it can be understood why 
Columbus the Dreamer, as he sailed along its shores, felt assured 
that he had come upon the Land of Ophir whence King Solomon 
drew his wealth of gold. 

There is little to suggest the Land of Ophir about the town 
of Colon as it appears at the present day. The town lies on the 
margin of a sodden sv/amp, the mud shore of which has been 
trodden into the semblance of honest earth by generations of 
human feet. It is a small place, being composed of one long 
street from the back of which minor streets come off at intervals. 
These struggle for varying distances towards the swamp, and then 
drop off in despair among miscellaneous rubbish. The general 
plan of the town, therefore, is that of a discarded comb with 
broken and irregular teeth. 

The houses are, for the most part, wooden shanties of the 
dirtiest, among which drinking bars and cafes are notable. There 



3o8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

are incongruous, indefinite shops kept by Chinamen, and store- 
houses filled with such a medley of untidy goods as would suggest 
the hoard of an ancient and unmethodical buccaneer. The 
unkempt roadway is filthy and full of mud holes. Fortunately 
the railway runs along the main street and so presents, when 
trains are not passing, a convenient promenade. The place is hot, 
sickly and dispirited, a rendezvous of dejected loafers. Any 
backwood settlement in the Far West may be more rudimentary, 
but it would at least be alive with vigour, hope and determination. 
Here there is only a yawning apathy, a state of desponding 
anaemia. 

There is a look of the neglected lazar-house about the spot, 
and certainly the smell of the same ; for it is doubtful if any place 
is more fetid for its size than is this well-known seaport. Every 
city has its slums, but Colon is a slum without a city. It has the 
appearance, moreover, of being a temporary town erected to meet 
some emergency or calamity. It is a town, too, which seems to 
have never grown up, but to be still in a most unwholesome 
pseudo-infancy. In this respect it is like a poor, dwarfed cretin, 
who, although he may be fifty years of age, is yet a child in 
stature and in speech, beardless, and apt to spend the day playing 
marbles. 

In remarkable contrast to this comfortless, unhuman haunt of 
men is the adjacent American settlement of Cristobal, on the 
Canal Zone, where are charming houses, the most perfect clean- 
liness and order, as well as the latest developments of sanitary 
science. 

The inhabitants of Colon are mostly negroes, with a few brown 
or sallow men of very complex pedigree. The national costume 
consists of frayed trousers, a buttonless shirt and a slouch hat 
There is scarcely a woman to be seen in the place. While the 
squalor of the town is not to be excused, there are some grounds 
for the melancholia which seems to pervade its streets. The town 
is low-lying, and the fermenting swamp at the back of it does not 
make for cheerfulness. Then the wet season at Colon lasts for 
eight months out of the twelve, the annual rainfall reaching as high 



COLON. 309 

as 155 inches. Whether wet or dry it is always hot, not with a 
keen fiery sunj but with a steamy, enervating, invalid heat which 
carries little joy with it. 

Moreover death comes very often to Colon, so often that the 
place has been known as " the town of flags at half-mast." The 
burial ground is on Monkey Hill, where, during the time of 
epidemics from thirty to forty victims have been disposed of every 
day. This hill contains very many thousands of graves, the 
resting-places of Spaniards, French and English, of Negroes, 
Panama natives, Chinese and the Mulattoes of the Main, 
Probably there is no such burial ground in any other part of the 
earth. Those who have realised this have of late years changed 
the name of the height from Monkey Hill to Mount Hope. 
Dr. Nelson in his account of Panama^ gives a local doctor's 
description of the seasons at Colon. That practitioner recognised 
the following divisions, viz. " the wet season from April to Decem- 
ber, when the people die of yellow fever in four to five days, and 
the dry or healthy season from December to April, when they die 
of pernicious fever in twenty-four to thirty-six hours." 

Such is the Land of Ophir of Christopher Columbus. Such is 
the end of the Gold Road. 

' Five Years at Panama \ London, 1S91, 



3IO THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



Lxn. 

THE GOLD ROAD. 

The puny strip of land which separates the two great oceans of 
the world looks on the map so slender as to suggest that the 
Colossus of Rhodes might have stood astride of it, with a foot in 
either sea. It is a mere causeway a few square miles in width, 
yet no spot on the earth of its size can rival it in interest. 
Placed but a few degrees from the Equator, cursed by a deadly 
climate, and narcotised by a sweltering, enervating air, it has 
yet witnessed the most sturdy displays of human energy and 
aggression. It has been the scene of fights innumerable, of 
desperate ventures and of heroic daring. More than that, it has 
been the arena of enterprises unparalleled in magnitude, and can 
boast to exhibit at this day the greatest structural work ever 
attempted by man. 

Although the land is poor and profitless, being little more than 
swamp and jungle, it has been sought by eager thousands, and has 
borne upon its rough trails wealth in untold millions, gold enough, 
indeed, for a world's ransom. Upon this pestilential waste more 
money has been bestowed than would suffice to build a dozen 
stately cities, and yet it is a land where none make a home, a land 
without children, where the whole road from sea to sea is paved 
with dead men's bones. 

It was from a hill on the Isthmus that Vasco Nunez de 
Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean.^ From a like height 
Sir Francis Drake gazed upon that alluring sea — the first 
Englishman whose eyes had ever been greeted by a sight of it.'' 

' In 1513. « In 1573. 



THE GOLD ROAD. 311 

It was at Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus that Drake first made 
himself " redoubtable to the Spaniards," while the most famous 
deeds of the Buccaneers and their most venturesome assaults 
belong to the annals of this fever-stricken land. 

Across the Isthmus was carried year after year, partly by 
mule trains and partly by river, the incredible wealth of Peru. It 
was in the store-houses of Nombre de Dios that were piled up the 
gold and the precious stones of which the ancient empire of 
Mexico had been ransacked. It seemed as if the stream of gold 
could never cease, for after Mexico had been stripped, and after 
the mines of Peru had been dug bare, gold came hither from 
California. Thousands of pounds' worth of it were brought down 
to Panama, and thence carried across the Isthmus by the same 
Gold Road that the Spanish pioneers had made, carried in the 
same manner too — half-way by mule pack along the Cruces road, 
and half-way by the Chagres River. In 1855 the Trans-isthmian 
Railway from Colon to Panama was completed. 

During all these toiling years. Death has stood in the narrow 
crossing and has there exacted toll from whomsoever passed by 
the way. The loss of life involved in the construction of the little 
line of rail was alone appalling. The iron road moved across the 
land like the car of Juggernaut, crushing to death all living things 
it came upon. It has been said, and probably with truth, that 
every tie or sleeper beneath the rails cost a human life. Enriquez 
de Guzman, who came into these parts in 1 5 34, asserts that out 
of every hundred men who went to Peru for gold, eighty never 
returned again. In like manner, during the gold craze in Cali- 
fornia, the number who met with death on the Isthmus, within 
sight of the sea that was to carry them and their nuggets home, 
would have filled many a happy town. Last of all, during the 
construction of the canal by the French Company, men died 
yearly not in hundreds but in thousands. In truth there is no 
burial ground comparable with this on the face of the earth, for 
the dead lie thicker than the trees. 

The town of Panama stands about nine degrees north of the 
Equator. The Isthmus at its narrowest part is from thirty-one 



312 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

to thirty-three miles wide in a direct line. The railway, running 
as it does obliquely and with many turns, covers nearly forty-eight 
miles in its traverse. Extending along the Isthmus and parallel 
to the coasts is an irregular range of hills, a dwindling tentacle 
of the Andes. These heights are nearer to the Pacific than to 
the Atlantic Coast, for the Culebra Pass, through which both 
the railway and the canal are taken, is within ten miles of 
Panama. The country to the south of the mountains differs 
much — except in the particular of unhealthiness— from the land 
on the north At Panama the annual rainfall is about 75 
inches, while at Colon it may mount to 155 inches. On the 
Pacific shore the tide rises 14 feet, while on the Atlantic side 
the rise is but 14 inches. 

There are several rivers on the Isthmus, but the one of most 
interest is the Rio Chagres, which enters the Atlantic a little to 
the west of Colon. Both the railway and the canal follow it 
from the hills to the sea. It is a savage and reckless river 
uncurbable, untamable. During the dry season it is merely a 
sullen, fever-laden stream ; but in the time of the rains it breaks 
out into a maniacal torrent that sweeps to perdition whatever 
comes in its way, tearing up trees as if they were reeds, and 
bursting from its banks as if they were walls of sand. It has 
risen in a day from twenty to forty feet, and when the mad mood 
is on it, it must needs be left to rend, to howl and to destroy as 
it likes. The makers of the canal have surmounted many and 
great difficulties, but they have yet to make terms with the 
Chagres River. 

The stream, when sufficiently placid, is navigable for small 
boats as far as a village called Cruces. Cruces, whose ancient 
name was Venta Cruz, is about fifteen miles from Panama as 
the crow flies, and about eighteen by the road. Many a band 
of pirates have crept up this river to Cruces. It was by the Rio 
Chagres that Morgan's buccaneers made their crossing in the 
famous raid which led to the sacking of old Panama. For many 
years the Gold Road was by way of the mule track from Panama 
to Cruces, and thence by boats to the Northern sea. It was by 



THE GOLD ROAD. 313 

this route that the gold from California reached the east coast of 
America. 

This river and the Cruces trail have seen a great company 
of adventurers, eager and radiant with hope, pass to the Pacific, 
and a much diminished company wend their way back again. 
Among the latter have been jubilant men hugging bags of 
gold dust, men who could say that " their fortunes were 
made,", and there were others with empty pockets, dejected 
and in rags, who brought back with them nothing but the 
hard memory of disaster. Death took toll from them all, from 
the wealthy as well as from the shirtless, for the bag of gold 
was no talisman. Many who had passed the river and gained 
the sea, who stood even upon the deck of the home-going ship, 
felt the bony hand laid on their shoulders, and knew that the 
fever had tracked them down and had seized them at last. 

The town of Cruces, the town of the woful past, can never 
have been an enviable place of residence. At one time it 
possessed large store-houses, buildings of stone, ample barracks, 
a monastery, and a church of some pretence. When it was in this 
state of glory, it became famous as the scene of Drake's attack 
upon the mule train from Panama. Of peace and of reasonable 
quiet it has known nothing. It was periodically stormed by 
Indians, raided by buccaneers, and was burnt down at less certain 
intervals. In every trans-isthmian enterprise the destruction of 
Cruces became an inevitable feature. As Morgan approached it 
on his memorable expedition the Spaniards themselves set fire to 
the town, so that the pirates should find nothing in the place but 
some carefully poisoned wine. 

Cruces sank lower as years went on, until it became little more 
than a botch of shanties, of stinking mule sheds, and of blaring 
rum shops, a spot in whose festering streets one could expect to 
find, on any morning after the treasure convoy had come in, the 
puffed-up body of the muleteer who had drunk himself to death, 
or the corpse of a seaman with a knife sticking in his back, and 
his belt and pack missing. It is now " a poor, miserable place," 
composed of the dirty huts of a few negroes, half-breeds and 



314 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Indians. Of the many routes across the Isthmus, that by Cruces 
and the Chagres River remained to the last the favourite of the 
pirate and the smuggler. 

It would seem that the earliest Gold Road, " the roughly paved 
road " that Pizarro made, went from coast to coast by way of 
Cruces. It is still called the Royal Road. In Drake's time the 
treasure came from Panama to Nombre de Dios, a poor little 
harbour far to the east of Colon. In later years (for example in 
Dampier's day) the Gold Road reached the Atlantic at Porto Bello, 
a haven between Colon and Nombre de Dios. 

No matter whither it went there was no road like the Gold 
Road, none so fear-compelling, so hemmed about with terrors, 
so haunted by alarms. The feet of Dante never followed a path 
more full of dread. It was a narrow way, roughly paved. It 
shunned the open, slinking through the jungle where the shadows 
were deepest, climbing in furtive zigzags up the hillside, creeping 
like a bravo along the river bank. There were bleached bones by 
the wayside, skeletons of mules, skeletons of men. The snake 
loved to bask in the little sun that shone upon it. The air above 
the road was hot and vapid, and thick with deadly flies. 

The mule trains were often of immense length as the crossing 
was made at infrequent periods. In the van came a troop of 
Spanish soldiers, gaunt, weather-worn men, with the fear of the 
road in their eyes, fear of an ambush of Indians, fear of the forest 
outcast, fear above all of English pirates. Then with much 
clattering of hoofs and jingling of bells— for there is companion- 
ship in noise — came the mules with their packs. The rough 
goods went first, then the silver ; in the centre were the gold 
boxes, while in the rear followed bundles of miscellaneous loot. 
None could tarry by the way. It was a road that knew neither 
rest nor sleep. It was ever on and on and on. Through heat, 
through rain, over swamp, over stones, the cry was ever the same, 
" Press on." 

The crack of the slave-driver's whip could be heard along the 
line to keep hoofs and feet from lagging. One sick man, as the 
fever creeps over him, lets his head and arms drop upon the pack 




THE GOLD ROAD OUTSIDE OLD PANAMA. 
Showing the rough paving. 



THE GOLD ROAD. 315 

of his beast. A slash from a whip leaves a line of blood across 
his back and wakens him for a moment. The head falls on the 
pack again ; the feet move still because they are ever to move, for 
there is no halting on the Gold Road. The whip cuts another long 
wound in the skin, but the slave now feels it not ; the feet move 
a little longer ; they stumble, then stop, and the dying man rolls 
to the ground. The procession never falters, never swerves an 
inch. Fifty mules trample him into the mud ; their hoofs slide 
off his chest and his face. A dozen muleteers walk over him as 
they would over a hummock, with just a moment of wonder as to 
who he was. Then come the vultures, the rats and the ants, and 
there is one more skeleton by the Gold Road. 

It was a precious burden that the mule trains bore. It was 
the harvest of robbery and murder, the sheaves reaped by 
treachery and torture, a devil's crop. Every grain of gold came 
from a crucible whose furnace was fed with human lives. Every 
load bore some contribution from wretches who had been either 
worked to death or beaten to death. It was an Argosy of cruelty 
and greed. Costly as it was, none seem to have been made the 
richer by all the wealth that came by this pitiless way. 



3i6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



LXHI. 

SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD. 

In July 1572, Francis Drake, after elaborate preparations, 
descended upon the town of Nombre de Dios with the intention 
of seizing the treasure which was collected there, awaiting the 
arrival of the Plate Fleet from Spain. The assault was daring 
and brilliant, but it ended in failure. Drake was wounded, and 
although his men escaped with their lives they carried with 
them to the boats neither silver nor gold. Drake vanished after 
the attack as suddenly as he had appeared. He hid himself in 
one of the secret harbours, where he kept his stores, on the 
Atlantic coast of the Isthmus. In this solitude he planned 
an attack upon the mule train which periodically crossed the 
Isthmus with treasure from Panama to Nombre de Dios. His 
men had suffered heavily from fever, so Drake landed on the 
coast, some way to the east of Colon, with only eighteen of his 
crew but with a company of thirty faithful Maroons. 

After many days' tramping through the jungle they came 
to the high ground which lies between the two seas. This was 
in February 1573. The Maroon chief led Drake with much 
solemnity to a certain lofty hill, on the peak of which was a 
" goodly and great high tree." Steps had been cut in the trunk 
of this king of the forest and Drake was invited to climb to the 
summit. This he did. From the height he saw to the north 
' the Atlantic Ocean whence now we came," and to the south, 
some twenty miles away, a new ssa glistening in the sun. In 
this wise was the Pacific first revealed to the eyes of England. 
Drake gazed his fill at the wondrous sheet of water, and then and 



SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD. 317 

there " besought Almighty God of His goodness to give him life 
and leave to sail once in an English ship in that sea." This 
prayer was answered and in five years' time. 

Moving southwards the party of pirates and Indians reached 
at last to that grand stretch of park -like land which lies at the 
back of Panama city. They crept across the open grass downs, 
crawling on hands and knees, until they gained the shelter of 
a wood within a league of the town. From this safe point 
" our captain did behold and view the most of all that fair city, 
discerning the large street which lieth directly from the sea into 
the land, south and north." He would discern also near to the 
shore the square tower of the cathedral, which tower stands 
by the sea to this day. Drake sent a spy into the town, and 
learnt that the convoy was starting that very night for Venta 
Cruz. They were indeed already busy harnessing the mules 
in the market-place. The treasure train was to be exceptionally 
rich and heavy, the spy was told, 

Drake at once turned back and hurried for the Gold Road 
so as to intercept the convoy before it reached Venta Cruz, 
as Cruces was then called. He halted by the edge of the track 
about two leagues to the south of the little town, where he 
arranged an ambush, hiding his company in the long grass. 
Here they crouched ; every heart beating with eagerness, while 
now and then in the dark a cherry-red glow would illumine 
the face of a man who blew on his fuse to keep it alight. The 
pirates had not been lying down for more than an hour or so when 
the stillness of the forest was broken by the jingle of mule bells. 
The treasure train was coming. 

" Drake had given strict orders that no man should show 
himself, or as much as budge from his station. Yet one of the 
men, of the name of Robert Pike, now disobeyed those orders. 
' Having drunken too much aqua-vitae without water,' he forgot 
himself. He rose from his place in the grass, enticing a Cim- 
meroon with him, and crept up close to the road, 'with intent 
to have shown his forwardness on the foremost mules.' Almost 
immediately a cavalier came trotting past from Venta Cruz upon 



3i8 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

a fine horse, with a little page running at the stirrup. As he 
trotted by, Robert Pike 'rose up to see what he was.' The 
Cimmeroon promptly pulled him down and sat upon him ; but 
his promptness came too late to save the situation. All the 
English had put their shirts over their other apparel, * that we 
might be sure to know our own men in the pell mell of the night.' 
The Spanish cavalier had glanced in Robert Pike's direction, and 
had seen a figure rising from the grass * half all in white ' and very 
conspicuous. He had heard of Drake's being on the coast, and 
at once came to the conclusion that that arch-pirate had found 
his way through the woods to reward himself for his disappoint- 
ment at Nombre de Dios. He was evidently a man of great 
presence of mind. He put spurs to his horse, and galloped off 
down the road, partly to escape the danger, but partly also to 
warn the treasure train, the bells of which were now clanging 
loudly at a little distance from the ambuscade." ^ 

Still the mules came on, and were soon abreast of the crouching 
men. A whistle was blown, and the sailors with a cheer jumped 
out into the track. They seized the affrighted beasts, pulled off 
their packs and ripped them open, only to find, to their utter 
dismay, nothing but wool and dried provender. The Spanish 
cavalier had done well. He had hurried the food mules to the 
front, and, while Drake's seamen were turning over worthless 
sacks and clouting bewildered muleteers, the gold and silver and 
the cases of jewels were being galloped back to Panama. 

This is not the place to follow the adventure further, nor to 
tell how Drake that very night fell upon Cruces and took it, nor 
how he got some little loot there, and after a most painful journey 
reached his boats. 

Before returning to England the persistent buccaneer once 
more visited the Gold Road, laying an ambush between Cruces 
and Nombre de Dios. Robert Pike had no doubt been kept 
without drink on that occasion, for the English seized the mule 
train by absolute surprise, and with it more gold and silver than 
they could carry. So the voyage proved to be " rioh and gain- 

' On the Spanish Main, by John Masefield, page 65 : London, 1906. 



SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD. 319 

full," for which good ending, says the pious chronicler, there must 
be ascribed " to God alone the glory." 

One of the most interesting of the many crossings of the 
Isthmus was that accomplished by Dampier in 1681. It is 
interesting because Dampier was a ready writer, who left behind 
him a minute account of the journey in a book modestly referred 
to as "this plain Piece of mine." Dampier was the son of a 
tenant farmer of East Coker, near Yeovil, and at the age of 
seventeen was apprenticed to a master mariner who hailed from 
Weymouth. After sundry experiences the farmer's boy found 
himself drawn by the magic of the West Indies as steel is drawn 
by a magnet. He tried logwood cutting for a time, but, finding 
that occupation dull, he joined the Buccaneers, with whom he 
lived for some nine years. 

The career of a pirate would hardly seem to be conducive to 
sustained literary work, yet Dampier wrote his best book while 
on board a pirate ship. He would often have to leave a chapter 
unfinished in order to join in the looting of a town, or the boarding 
of a Spanish merchantman, or the shortening of sail in a breeze. 
Living as he did among ruined lumbermen, cut-throats, and chronic- 
ally uproarious seamen, he had little encouragement for study; 
yet he kept up his orderly notes upon natural history, his accounts 
of winds and tides, of the habits of natives, and of the geography 
of the parts he visited with pious persistence. One can picture 
him sitting on the deck, in the shadow of a gun, busy with his ink- 
horn and paper, but with his cutlass and pistols handy, sketching 
that excellent map of Panama which he fondly describes as "a 
particular Draught of my own composure." In this pursuit he 
may have been distracted a little by a drunken chorus bawled out 
from the forecastle, and be still more disturbed when a tipsy 
pirate stumbled across his outstretched feet. 

He kept his manuscript, or "copy," in "a large Joint of 
Bambo," which, he says, " I stopt at both ends, closing it with 
Wax, so as to keep out any water. In this I preserved my 
Journal and other Writings from being wet, tho' T was often forced 
to swim-" 



320 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

At the period of his life with which we are now concerned 
Dampier was pirating in the Pacific with that execrable scoundrel 
Bartholomew Sharp, the ending of whose voyage at Barbados has 
been already described (page 51). The author and certain of his 
comrades, "being altogether dissatisfied with Sharp's conduct," 
resolved to leave him and return by way of the Isthmus to paths 
of peace. The party consisted of forty-four white men, three 
Indians, and five slaves. They had with them a good deal of 
loot; for, in spite of Sharp's objectionable manners and habits, 
the expedition had been very profitable. They were indeed 
weighed down with pieces of eight in bags, with parcels of silk, 
and with miscellaneous weapons and curiosities, after the manner 
of the knight in " Alice in Wonderland." 

They landed at the head of the Gulf of St. Miguel and struck 
across the Isthmus in a north-easterly direction. It was a fearful 
march, full of dull misery. In the first place it was the rainy 
season of the year, while in addition to this there was great 
difificulty in finding efficient guides. The fee for a guide was a 
hatchet, but those who obtained this reward did uncommonly little 
for their services. The party at last came across one Indian who 
was reputed to have an intimate knowledge of the district, but 
unfortunately this expert was in a surly mood, and indeed gave 
very impertinent answers to the questions put to him. He was 
not only rude but positively obstructive. The pirates " tempted 
him with Beads, Money, Hatchets, Matcheats or long , Knives ; 
but nothing would work on him." He regarded the display of 
wealth with as much contempt as a cabman regards a shilling 
when presented for a three-mile fare. 

This incorruptible native had however a wife, while among the 
pirates there chanced to be a man who had some knowledge of the 
female temperament. This mariner, with a look at the disdainful 
Indian, drew something very carefully out of his sea-bag. It was 
an unusual object to be found among a buccaneer's luggage, for 
when it was unfolded and shaken out it proved to be a " Sky- 
coloured Petticoat." This garment the seaman, with a confident 
grin, popped over the head of the guide's wife and fastened it 



SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD. 321 

round her waist with the deftness of a man who had had ex- 
perience. The giggling lady " was so much pleased with the 
Present that she immediately began to chatter to her Husband, 
and soon brought him into a better humour." 

Through the virtue of the sky-coloured petticoat the weary 
pirates were led for many days. Even under such inspired 
pilotage the journey was a tramp along a circle in Purgatory. 
The wretched freebooters stumbled through swamps like the 
Slough of Despond ; they tore their way through tangled woods, 
yard by yard ; they fought with the jungle as men battle with 
fire ; they ploughed through mud up to their waists ; they 
clambered up slopes of green slime, clinging on with their nails. 
Their bodies became infested with ticks, their faces so swollen by 
the stings of flies that they could hardly see, and when the rain 
ceased in the day, the sun burnt them with a steaming heat. Often 
and often they could find no shelter for the night, nor could they, 
owing to the downpour, light a fire. They must needs lie on the 
sponge-like ground, which was so sodden that any movement of 
the uneasy limbs was accompanied by the wheezing of water and 
the bubbling up of gas. 

So impenetrable was the jungle that on one day they only 
advanced two miles, cutting their way all the time through a web 
of brambles, " ropes " and creepers. Their average progress 
during the whole journey was five miles a day, for in this drear 
wandering they travelled no less than no miles, and it took them 
twenty-three days to accomplish it. They lost their way a 
hundred times, reeling about like drunken men. On one day 
Dampier estimates that they crossed the same river thirty times, 
sometimes by swimming, sometimes by wading up to their arm- 
pits, in the futile search for a few yards of open path. 

On the morning of the eighth day they came to a river so 
deep and swift that none dared venture to cross it. " At length," 
writes Dampier, in the journal he kept in the " Joint of Bambo," 
" we concluded to send one Man over with a Line, who should hale 
over all our things first and then get the Men over." This being 
agreed on, one George Gayny took the end of the line and, 

Y 



322 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 

making it fast about his neck, plunged into the torrent. Un- 
fortunately the line became entangled and Gayny was turned over 
on his back ; whereupon the men on the bank threw the rest of 
the line into the river, hoping thus to clear it It did drift clear, 
but the rush of water was terrific ; Gayny was weakened by the 
tramp, and moreover he carried a bag on his back containing 
300 dollars in silver. Two hands rose for a moment out of the 
brown whirlpool and Gayny vanished. 

Some stragglers came upon him a few days later, lying dead 
on the shore of a little creek, his arms outstretched, his eyelids 
closed, and with the bag of coins still fast to his back. They 
themselves were too spent to think of money ; so they left poor 
Gayny and his bag untouched and " meddled not with any 
of it." 

Hardest to bear, on this fearsome journey, was the want of 
food. They nearly died of starvation. Often enough they " had 
no sort of Food for the Belly." For days they were reduced to 
eating Macaw berries and such-like fruit. Now and then they 
got plantains and yams, and even a bird or two, or a wild pig ; 
but their happiest day was when they shot three fat monkeys and 
were able to cook them. 

On the twenty-second day, to their infinite comfort, they 
caught sight of the sea. By this time their clothes had nearly 
rotted off their bodies ; their feet were bleeding and tied up in 
rags ; some were lame, many were sick ; all were covered with 
sores and ulcers due to falls, or scratches, or the bites of insects. 
" Our Thighs are stript with wading through so many Rivers," 
writes the pirate author, " and not a Man of us but wisht the Journey 
at an End." They came out on the coast by the Mulatas Islands, 
and were happy in finding there a French pirate ship, whose com- 
mander — one Captain Tristian — took all the poor bedraggled 
company on board. 

It remains to be mentioned that with this distressful land party 
was their medical adviser, a surgeon named Wafer. How he 
came to find himself on a pirate ship is not known. During the 



SOME WHO FOLLOWED THE GOLD ROAD. 323 

crossing of the Isthmus he received a grievous wound of the leg 
through the accidental explosion of some gunpowder. Being 
unable to walk, he was left behind with the Indians to rest and get 
well. So impressed were the simple savages by his professional 
atalities that they could not make enough of him. It is indeed 
probable that no practitioner has ever been so embarrassed by the 
attentions of grateful patients. As a mark of their esteem they 
removed the few rags of clothing that still adhered to his body 
and painted him, from head to foot, in brilliant colours, red, blue, 
yellow, and green. With this radiant testimonial upon him he, 
in due course, joined his shipmates. They saw walk down to 
the beach a nude figure decorated like a harlequin, and attended 
by obsequious Indians. It was not until he lifted up his voice 
that the pirates recognised in this strange being their much- 
respected ship's doctor. 

With the doctor came another member of the party who had 
been left behind with him when he was laid up by the accident. 
This was a Mr. Richard Jobson, a gentleman who seems to have 
been as much out of place on a pirate craft as was the sky- 
coloured petticoat. Mr. Jobson was a person of learning, a 
Divinity student, who had been an assistant in a chemist's shop 
in London. What led him to abandon the making of pills and 
powders in order to go a-pirating is a mystery, especially as a 
filibuster's cabin is no school of theology. 

He took with him across the Isthmus, in addition to his share 
of the loot, a Greek Testament, portions from which he was in 
the habit of translating aloud to the pirates when they were 
in a mood for displays of scholarship. It is probable that on 
occasions, when the party were squatting in a swamp after an 
arduous day, Mr. Jobson would relieve the tedium of the bivouac 
by elucidating especially difficult passages for the benefit of the 
damp buccaneers. 

Unhappily the poor Greek scholar, when he reached the brink 
of the sea, was already dying, and indeed in a few days he did die. 
One may imagine that as he lay delirious in his cot he would still 



324 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

hold in his hand the weather-soddened Greek Testament, marking 
with his finger the place of some verse in the rendering of which 
he was most proud. As some kindly pirate fanned him with 
a leaf, he would fancy himself back again in the cool, sweetly 
scented shop in the familiar street, handing sachets over the 
counter to gentle-eyed English girls. 



LXIV. 

OVER THE ISTHMUS TO PANAMA. 

The Trans-isthmian Railway is well managed ; the carriages are 
comfortable, and the journey from Colon to Panama occupies 
about two hours and a half For some few miles beyond Colon 
the line passes through a dismal swamp, on the far edge of which 
stands a low hill of red earth. This is Monkey Hill, or Mount 
Hope, a height covered from base to summit by many thousands 
of graves. There is consistency in this first view of the land, for 
the swamp and the cemetery are very characteristic of the Isthmus. 

The country generally through which the line passes is wild, 
rough and picturesque, swamp and jungle, jungle and swamp, 
with here a sweep of prairie and there a hill. It is a tangled, 
impenetrable land, ever hot and steamy, and any who scan as they 
pass its knotted forests, its trap-like ravines and its oozing bogs, 
will understand the horrors of Dampier's tramp, and why he so 
earnestly " wisht the Journey at an End." 

The line leads by the Canal cutting so that a good idea of the 
features of that stupendous work may be gained en route. Many 
camps are passed, many clearings in the jungle, many clumps of 
negro hovels, many mushroom towns full of trim, well-built houses 
and " hotels," of " restaurants " and stores, of Chinese shanties and 
immense, loud-echoing workshops. In many places the forest has 
been cleared by fire, so that the place looks desolate. Through 
the disturbed solitude run miles of rails, tracking in all directions, 
and on each thread of the web are a puffing engine and trucks. 
There are waggons by the thousand, leagues of oil pipes and of 
pipes feeding the drills, mountainous slopes of dirt, a forest of 



326 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

cranes, mammoth steam-shovels, columns of smoke, and the ever- 
present sound of steam whistles, of heavy hammers and of ringing 
anvils. The mass of discarded and crumbling machinery seen by 
the roadside, as well as the host of overturned " dumping-cars " 
are remarkable. In one siding are some thirty French locomotives 
in orderly line which have never been used, and which are now 
almost buried in the jungle. Bushes hide the wheels and make 
arbours of the coal tenders, while creepers climb around the 
funnels as around the trunks of trees. 

Of the great engineering work itself it is unnecessary to speak, 
for its details are familiar to most. It is so marvellous an 
undertaking that it quite overshadows another work on the 
Isthmus which is not less marvellous, but which attracts no 
attention, and that is the clearing of the country of disease, and 
the converting of this deadly, pestilential land into a healthy 
settlement. This enterprise, undertaken by the American 
sanitary authorities, has been accomplished by Colonel Gorgas 
(a surgeon in the United States Army) and his staff. Colonel 
Gorgas is responsible for the sanitation of the Canal Zone. He has 
under him no less than ninety-one medical men, and a personnel 
of over 3000 subordinates. To his undying credit he has made 
this most unpromising strip of land a model of applied hygiene, 
and has shown, on a scale never before paralleled, what preventive 
medicine, under an enlightened and liberal direction, is capable of 
doing. 

Within about six miles of Colon, near a place called Gatun, 
the traveller by the railway will obtain his first glimpse of the 
Chagres River. A sight of the river is afforded many times 
during the next twenty-four miles of the journey, for the line 
keeps close to the stream, crossing it indeed at San Pablo. It is a 
sinister, evil-looking river, a sullen, still river whose waters have 
the shifty yellow- green tint of a snake's eye and the smell of fever. 
It has cut a deep channel for itself, so deep that in places it is 
almost hidden by the bush. Its banks are of brown earth, bare 
and slimy, as if nothing could live within touch of the uneasy 
current. Along its sides are hosts of dead trees which it has torn 



OVER THE ISTHMUS TO PANAMA. 327 

up in its fury, and which are not only dead but stripped bare, and 
bleached like skeletons. Here and there are dangerous shoals of 
stones, malevolent pools, and beaches of rust-coloured mud. 

In many a creek and on many a shelving bank is to be seen 
the Indian canoe, the dug-out, the canoa of old days ; a poor, dull, 
blundering thing it is, for it belongs to the age of the stone 
hatchet. This is the boat in which the buccaneers crept up the 
stream to Cruces, with their fuses alight and their hangers in their 
hands. This is the craft in which the gold was paddled down to 
the sea, breathlessly, eagerly. The river is unchanged, its curves, 
its pools, its shallows are the same ; the piragua^ the native boat, is 
still the same. Let it be filled with a crew of sea-tanned men and 
a few Maroons, let the banks echo once more with their reckless 
laughter, and behold, there are Drake's men making their way up 
stream in search of treasure ! 

As the high ground is reached on the journey the country 
becomes more open and infinitely more beautiful. Such settle- 
ments as Gorgona, Matachin and Las Cascadas are charmingly 
situated. They are just to the north of the iamous Culebra 
Pass. To the left of these stations certain pleasant hills are to 
be seen, from the highest of which Bilboa is said to have ob- 
tained his first view of the Pacific. To the left of Bas Obispo, 
just beyond Matachin, is the once famous town of Cruces, the 
Venta Cruz of the buccaneers. It is now merely a depressing 
hamlet lying out of sight of the railway. 

From Culebra the line begins to drop towards the south, and 
every one is on the look out for a glimpse of the western sea. 
Panama lies upon a flat, at a spot where the ocean fills to its very 
brim a good green bay, a bay encircled by trees, a bay dotted 
with islands to temper the glare of the boundless mirror. There 
is a great fascination about this far-off view of the sea, but 
perhaps it conveys a disappointment to those who expect that 
some magic must illumine the face of this romantic ocean, and 
that its waters will be bluer, or clearer, or in some way more 
wonderful than any oceans that are. After all it has to be owned 
that it is only the sea. 



328 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Panama city is small, Spanish-looking and picturesque. Dampier 
was charmed with the view of it from the bay, and maintained 
that its many handsome buildings " altogether made one of the 
finest objects he did ever see." It was founded in 1673, after 
the destruction of Old Panama by Morgan the buccaneer, and 
has had since then many unquiet experiences. The streets are a 
little dingy, not conspicuous for neatness, and not free from smells. 
The houses, mostly of wood with wide balconies and verandahs, 
are dazzling with white paint and shaded, wherever possible, 
with palms. They possess the barred windows and heavy doors, 
as well as the drowsy courtyards, which mark the dwellings of 
the Spaniard. 

The many narrow lanes in the city afford a pleasant refuge 
from the tropical sun, especially as at the end of most of them 
will be a glimpse of the sea. There are many modern buildings 
in Panama designed in accord with what is known as " the official 
colonial style." They are pretentious and unsightly enough, but 
at the same time the streets abound with old stone houses of great 
charm. There may be only fragments of these — an arched 
doorway, a wall of sturdy masonry, a dark entry, fragments of 
fine carving or a gracious balcony in stone worthy of Seville. 
The/e are curious little old-world squares, too, with a garish and 
untidy garden in the centre and a pale church at one end, marked 
by strange gables, a bell tower decorated with fantastic sculptures 
and endless saints in niches. 

Some of the churches in the town, gorgeously built in a long- 
forgotten style, are singularly picturesque. The cathedral, erected 
in 1760, presents two florid towers and a fagade which is a little 
over- elaborate and gaudy, and is not improved by much rain- 
streaked whitewash. The first church built in the city was that 
dedicated to San Felipe Neri. It stands in a narrow street, 
a severely plain building, over whose sole entrance is a shield 
with the inscription " San Felipe Neri, 1688." It has a quaint old 
tower and belfry. Its enormous door, studded heavily with 
brazen knobs, was intended to resist — as it has resisted — the 
attacks of marauders. It is evidently too a place of refuge, for 



OVER THE ISTHMUS TO PANAMA. 329 

the simple lancet windows are recessed like the loopholes in 
a fortress, and are placed so high in the wall that none could 
possibly climb into them. Other fine churches are those of Santa 
Ana, Nuestra Sefiora de la Merced, and the ruined church of 
Santo Domingo. A great deal of the city wall, built in 1673, 
still exists along the sea front of the town, and very picturesque 
it is. 

It is claimed that the streets of Panama present the most 
mixed population to be found anywhere in the world. This may 
be so ; for certainly in this city can be seen every conceivable 
tint of skin, from the coal-black negro to the pallid European 
who is ever haunted by a sickly fear of the sun. 



330 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



LXV. 

morgan's raid. 

Morgan's Raid took place in 1671, yet the folk of Panama speak 
of it still. It can never be forgotten, for it led to the destruction of 
the old capital and the founding of the new, the present Panama 
being some five or six miles to the west of the city that Morgan 
demolished. 

Morgan was the son of a Welsh yeoman. He took to the sea, 
and of course made his way to the West Indies. He reached 
Barbados, where he was sold as a servant. When he had secured 
his freedom he hurried to Port Royal, and, landing there penni- 
less, was glad enough to join the pirates. His extraordinary 
adventures have been told in much detail by John Esquemeling, 
who was one of the party in the Great Raid.* Of his early life 
it need only be said that by industry and merit he rose to be 
captain of the Buccaneers, and under his guidance they eclipsed 
all exploits that had hitherto found a place in the annals of 
piracy. Morgan possessed himself of islands, raised fleets and 
armies, assaulted and took important cities — such as Puerto del 
Principe in Cuba, Porto Bello on the Isthmus, Maracaibo on the 
Spanish Main — and acquired thereby a gratifying amount of 
wealth. 

In his advance upon Old Panama he first of all seized the 
fortified town of Chagres at the mouth of the river of that name, 
and then, in January 167 1, started up stream with 1200 men 
packed into thirty-seven canoes and boats. They had a fearful 
journey, being fired at from the banks with bullets by the 

' The Buccaneers of America: London, 1893. 



MORGAN'S RAID. 331 

Spaniards and with arrows by the Indians. They were, moreover, 
unable to get food, and so suffered miseries from starvation. On 
the seventh day they reached Cruces, hoping to find there a store 
of provisions ; but to their dismay the town had been already 
burned by the enemy, who had left nothing behind them but 
some poisoned wine, which had disastrous effect upon those who 
drank it 

On the eighth day the party started for Panama along the 
Gold Road, the narrow paved road where Drake had lain in 
ambush for the mule trains. Their advance was so fiercely op- 
posed by both Indians and Spaniards that they had to fight for 
every mile of the way. On the ninth day they gained the summit 
of a ridge and saw below them the superb city of Panama, with its 
bright-tiled roofs, its orderly streets, its monastery steeples, and 
above all the great square tower of the cathedral. This tower 
reminded one of the pirates of Old St Paul's in London, a tower 
that he had seen no doubt many a time from some tavern balcony 
in Limehouse. Beyond the city was the famous harbour and the 
radiant Pacific Ocean, with ships passing by " upon their lawful 
occasions." It was a sight that made them forget the toilsome 
river, the long tramp and the biting pangs of hunger. 

Between the hill upon which they stood and the sea stretched 
an open park-like country, being that same " pleasant country " 
which Dampier describes, and " which is full of small Hills and 
Valleys beautified by many Groves and Spots of Trees." It was 
a land of rich pasture such as encircles many a goodly town in 
England. On these green slopes, in undisturbed content, numbers 
of cattle were grazing. By midday the starving pirates had shot 
a few of these beasts, had built a fire, and had sat down to the 
only satisfying meal they had enjoyed since they left the sea. 
After they had gorged themselves to the full they crept down 
the slope and bivouacked for the night as near to the city as they 
dared. 

The Spaniards were by this time well alarmed ; the bells were 
clanging in the cathedral tower, and all night through it was 
evident from the lights in the streets and from the lanterns 



332 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

moving along the walls that every man-at-arms in the city was 
astir. 

Early on the next morning Morgan began his advance. The 
Spaniards had mustered a strong force of cavalry and artillery 
outside the town. The buccaneers kept a little way further along 
the Cruces road, and then, to better avoid the enemy, made a 
detour to the west, crossing the ground upon which Panama city 
now stands. They soon defiled into the open savannah around 
the old capital, and made their final approach by a route parallel 
to the sea. The land here is in undulating folds, with many dips 
and gulleys and many clumps of bushes. In these dips and be- 
hind these bushes the Spanish sharpshooters were lying, while the 
main army of 400 horsemen and twenty-four companies of foot 
were drawn up in battle array before the town. The Spanish 
governor was unable to take an active part in the defence, having 
been " lately blooded three times for an Erysipelas." 

Morgan extended his men along such shelter as was afforded 
by a " dry Gut or watercourse." In this position he received the 
first charge of the enemy's cavalry and from this point he made 
his general advance. It was a slov/ and bloody business, for every 
bush hid a man with a musket, while the horsemen charged again 
and again. Step by step the buccaneers pushed their way on to 
the city wall. The outer works were silenced ; the bridge was 
crossed ; the gate battered down, and then with hoarse cheers the 
pirates poured into the streets. 

Here the battle " soon kindled very hot." Barricades with 
guns had been thrown across the chief roads ; these had to be 
rushed and spiked ; volleys poured upon the buccaneers from side 
streets, from loopholed gates, from the parapets and stone 
balconies of houses. The town was in chaos ; distracted people, 
loaded with their dearest possessions, rushed to and fro ; the sick 
and infirm, who had been left behind, were screaming from their 
windows. Waggons piled up with treasure were galloping for the 
far gate, while trembling citizens were saddling mules or were 
hiding money bags in holes and corners. Dogs, pigs, and fowls 
scuttled wildly among the rabble. The noise of firearms, of 



MORGAN'S RAID. 333 

yelling men and shrieking women, of clattering horses and of 
doors being crashed into splinters, drowned even the persisting 
clang of the cathedral bell. The streets reeked with the smell of 
powder and of smouldering fuses, while in the calm blue air above 
the city the convent pigeons were wheeling in circles of terror. 

By three o'clock' in the afternoon the city of Panama was in 
the hands of the pirates. The loss on both sides was very heavy, 
and so desperate had been the fighting that many, as Raleigh 
would say, came to " a most ugly and lamentable death." 

Morgan had hardly halted his men in the Plaza before the cry 
arose that the city was in flames. Whether the firing was 
accidental or the work of the Spaniards matters little. What is 
certain is that the " very noble and very loyal city of Panama " 
was soon reduced to a heap of blackened ruins. 

After three weeks devoted to methodical looting, with suitable 
torture of such of the " nobility and gentry " as fell into his hands, 
Morgan thought it prudent to leave Panama and return to the 
Atlantic. "On the 24th of February, of the year 167 1, Captain 
Morgan departed from the city of Panama, or rather from the 
place where the said city of Panama did stand ; of the spoils 
whereof, he carried with him one hundred and seventy-five beasts 
of carriage, laden with silver, gold and other precious things, 
besides six hundred prisoners more or less, between men, women, 
children, and slaves." 

Starting back again along the Cruces road Morgan reached 
the port at the mouth of the river without loss or adventure. As 
soon as he had gained the sea " he went secretly on board his own 
ship," and as secretly slunk off to Port Royal, taking the provision 
ships with him, and a great deal more than his proper share of the 
plunder. His old comrades in arms he left behind on the barren 
shore at Chagres, cursing fluently, shaking their fists and stamping 
their feet until their bodies rattled like money boxes, for they had 
still much coin upon them. Before the perfidious Morgan was out 
of sight they had begun to rummage their sacks and examine 
their cannikins for food, for they were face to face with starvation. 



334 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



LXVI. 

OLD PANAMA. 

Old Panama, the city that Morgan took, h'es on the shores of 
a great bay where the land is flat and where the jungle grows 
into the beach. It can claim to be " the oldest European city 
in America," for it was founded, in or about the year 1 5 1 8, by one 
Pedrarias Davila, a penniless adventurer from Spain, who, like 
many of his kind, found his way to the golden Indies. It was 
ever a city goodly to look upon, and even at the end, when ruin 
had emptied its stately streets, it made " a pleasant show to the 
vessels that are at sea " — at least so said Ringrose, the pirate, and 
he was not a man of mawkish sentiment. 

For a century and more Panama was a place of marvellous 
splendour, so that all who saw it spoke of " the glorious city of 
Panama," " the grandest in the South Seas," " the gate of the 
Western World." It was from Panama that the discoverers of 
Peru set forth upon their marvel-revealing voyage. To the 
harbour of the town came in galleons, pirogues and pinnaces the 
precious merchandise of South America, the pearls from the Pearl 
Islands, the slaves from the far-extending coasts. As the city 
grew in wealth so it grew in magnificence, in the costliness of its 
houses, in the extravagance of its luxuries, and in that languid 
sensuousness which saps life in the tropics. The merchant princes 
of Panama, with their lace-decked tunics of brocaded silk and 
their retinues of slaves, well-nigh outshone the haughty citizens 
of even Venice and Genoa. The great slave market of the city 
was one of the wonders of the west. The gold fleet that 
anchored off the islands and landed its freight in the shallow 
harbour rivalled that of Jason with the Golden Fleece, 



5^v^''-' 




THE BRIDGE LEADING INTO OLD PANAMA. 




THE SEA WALL AT OLD PANAMA. 



OLD PANAMA. 335 

At the time of Morgan's Raid Panama possessed a cathedral, 
two churches, eight monasteries, and over ten score store-rooms 
for wares. It contained some 7000 houses. The better of these 
were built of stone or brick, with the upper parts of finely carved 
cedar wood. The higher stories overhung the lower, so that 
pleasant shadows fell across the cobble-stoned streets, and the 
ladies in the balcony could look down on the mules as they passed 
by with their gay trappings. In the suburbs were gardens, while 
beyond was that glorious savannah where grazed rich flocks and 
herds. 

Old Panama is some five or six miles to the east of the present 
city. A part of the way thither is by a wide, new road which 
crosses the savannah. About a mile along the road will be seen 
to the left a high ridge. This is called the Buccaneer's Hill, for 
it is claimed that it was from this point that Morgan obtained 
his first sight of the city. The road winds through that peaceful, 
open grass country which so charmed the pirates, who, red with 
murder, had fought their way across from the Northern Sea. 
It is, as Dampier says, " a brave land," of just such gentle downs 
and dells as children play among. Cattle graze on these uplands 
still, as they did on the day when Morgan and his men appeared 
panting over the crest of the hill. 

The new road probably follows very nearly the route taken 
by the buccaneers in their approach upon the city. It crosses 
a tiny stream in a hollow, and there can be little doubt but that, 
this is the " dry Gut or watercourse " along which Morgan ex- 
tended his men and where he awaited the first charge of the 
Spanish cavalry. The waving downs between this little " nullah " 
and the town would, have given excellent shelter to the skirmishers 
who harassed him in the early part of his advance. 

As the site of the city is neared the road must needs be left, 
and the rest of the journey undertaken on foot. The ruins of Old 
Panama lie in the midst of what appears at first to be an im- 
penetrable jungle. Shortly after entering the wood, however, 
a narrow road is come upon which pushes through the shadows 
of the forest in the direction of the city. It is a suspicious road, 



336 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

that turns stealthily to this side and to that, as if it went in dread- 
Yet it moves aside for neither ridge nor gulley, as if it knew no 
tiredness. Even when the sun is at high noon the road is dark, for 
only in rare places will a streak of light fall across it. Although 
roughly paved with large stones, it is yet wild and unkempt, and 
much overgrown with weeds. 

This is the famous Gold Road, the road to Cruces, the road of 
the mule trains that carried the wealth of Peru across the land on 
the way to Spain. Along this purgatorial path, poor, worn and 
neglected as it is, treasure has been borne to the worth of untold 
millions. One almost expects to hear the jingle of the mule bells 
and the clatter of hoofs on the stones, or to see emerge round the 
bend the soldiers of the advanced guard, with their muskets in 
their hands and their horses sniffing the way in fear. The silence 
that muffles the path is now broken only by the call of birds or 
the rustle of a snake in the thicket. It was down this tragic road 
/ that the pirates rushed, hot-foot, upon the city in the terrible year 
of 1 67 1, while it is probable enough that by this very path the 
spy sent forth by Drake made his way to the market-place where 
he witnessed the marshalling of the mule train. 

Colonel Gorgas, who has been long resident in Panama, tells 
me that the Gold Road can be still followed for miles towards 
Cruces, although it is in many places a mere trail in the forest 
In like manner there stretch to the northwards those other two 
famous roads, the one to Nombre de Dios, and that which led to 
Porto Bello. 

Keeping to the Cruces road, one emerges at last into the open 
by the margin of a wide and beautiful bay. Here the paved track 
runs between low walls, and then crosses a stone bridge into the 
town. The bridge is narrow, as no doubt the buccaneers found 
to their cost. It spans a little arm of the sea which runs into the 
salt-water lagoon behind the city. In spite of its great age this 
bridge, with its single arch, is well preserved, for the Spanish 
masons of old days were no mean builders. On the far side of 
the bridge is the gate-house, a building of great strength, whose 
ruins are almost shrouded in the forest 



OLD PANAMA. 337 

The ancient town lay along the shore of two bays which are 
separated by a spit of rock. The bay to the west of the spit 
presents a wide sweep, full open to the sea. This is the bay just 
spoken of The cove to the east of the point is small and narrow, 
and was the harbour of Old Panama. The jungle in which the 
city is lost comes down to the very edge of the sands, and is so 
dense that it is impossible to make a way through it. To reach 
the cathedral and the haven it is necessary therefore to walk along 
the beach. What a tramp it is ! There is not a breath of wind 
stirring ; there is not a speck of shade ; the heat is intense ; the 
white sand into which the feet sink at every step is almost too hot 
to touch, so that one wonders why the land crabs which crawl 
over it are not cracked by the heat. The air above the beach 
trembles and shimmers as if it rose from a crucible. The glare 
from the sea and from the metal-like waste of glistening mud left 
by the tide is almost blinding. 

At the far end of the bay, near the spit of rock, is the 
cathedral. It was dedicated to Saint Anastasius and^ stands close 
to the beach. It is represented now by a strong, square tower, 
built of brick faced with grey-green stone. Its upper windows are 
arched, its lower windows are square. It is a simple tower of 
immense solidity, still sturdy and defiant. This is the tower that 
Drake saw from the wood, a league beyond the town ; this is the 
beacon that cheered the eyes of Morgan when he gained the 
summit of the sea hills, and that guided him in his desperate 
venture. This same tower was the pillar of cloud, seen far out at 
sea, that led Bartholomew Sharp and a score of other ruffians in 
many nefarious wanderings. It is said that upon the altar of the 
Virgin within this church Pizarro laid his votive offering before 
he started upon that voyage which led to the discovery of Peru. 
Within the tower is a stone stair leading to the belfry, the very 
stair down which stumbled the trembling sexton who tolled the 
alarm bell as Morgan and his men neared the bridge. Beneath 
the tower is a wide stone arch of surprising massiveness. The 
walls of the church still stand, but the space between them is filled 



338 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

with tangled bush, through which no man could make his way 
unless armed with a cutlass. 

Along the margin of the shore, near by the cathedral, are heavy 
walls and the remains of strong buildings, which represent, no 
doubt, the sea defences and the store-houses of the old city. Any 
who force a passage through the wood, which lies at the back of 
the church, will come upon endless relics of the great metropolis — • 
paved ways and wide courts, stout walls, the lower stories of 
houses as well as doorways, stone windows filled with creepers, 
and rugged foundations covered by the undergrowth of a tropical 
forest. Long streets can be defined, and vague masses of titanic 
masonry can be met with, which may have belonged to fortresses, 
to monasteries, or to prisons. 

Over two hundred years have gone by since these lanes 
echoed to the feet of men ; since the roads were thronged with 
eager folk, pushing their way up from the quay ; since the mule 
bells broke in upon the dreams of fair women who dozed in the 
cedarwood balconies ; since the children chased the lizards in the 
i^atio which is now a mere maze of brambles. 

The famous harbour of the city is a spot of strange fascination. 
It is shut in by an impenetrable forest, whose trees and bushes 
come down to the water's edge. - The shore is of rough, black-grey 
rock. The harbour almost dries out at low tide, presenting then 
a sheet of shining mud in a ring of green. Ships in the old days 
could only enter at high water. When the tide ebbed they were 
left stranded, and so could be careened and scrubbed, and their 
cargoes carried ashore on the heads of slaves or by mule packs or 
in carts. It is hard to believe that this was once a famous haven, 
crammed with craft of all kinds, and echoing with the shipwrights' 
hammers, with the shouts of seamen, the noise of gangs of busy 
porters, and the occasional rattle of a salute, as a ship appeared in 
the offing. On the point of rock is an old stone fort, square-walled 
and solid, but hard to enter, not by reason of its defences, but from 
the entanglement of brushwood which almost buries it from sight. 

From this harbour mouth, looking westwards, can be seen the 
three little conical islands of Flamenco, Perico, and Nao3. It was 



OLD PANAMA 339 

around these islands, in the month of April 1680, that was fought 
one of the most desperate hand-to-hand fights ever witnessed on 
the sea — a fight between Spaniards and English pirates. It was 
in this engagement that the buccaneers Coxon, Sawkins, and 
Ringrose captured that ever-adventurous galleon the Most 
Blessed Trinity. The harbour of Panama that saw all this is 
now an utter solitude, silent and forgotten, a sea refuge hidden in 
a mysterious forest, a place of shadows, haunted only by pelicans 
and sea birds, and where none but the ghosts of ships come in 
on the rising tide. 



340 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



LXVII. 

"grog's" victory. 

Shortly after leaving Colon the steamer comes in sight of the 
beautiful cape of Manzanillo, a green cape where tree-covered 
hills rise one behind the other until they are lost far away in the 
haze. In this cape of creeks is an inlet where lies the shrunken 
town of Porto Bello, It lies at the end of a silent fiord, through 
which a stretch of blue water finds its way into the heart of the 
hills. As the ship passes by, it is possible to see the few houses of 
the town, the white sails in the harbour, the low sea wall and the 
stone fort of San Jeronimo. From all accounts of the place it 
would appear to be still interesting and picturesque, although 
Samuel Champlain considered it to be " the most evil and pitiful 
residence in the world," and Tom Cringle found it " a miserable, 
dirty, damp hole." In the depths of this haven rests a caravel 
of Christopher Columbus, which was abandoned there during the 
explorer's last voyage. 

Porto Bello, in spite of its strong fortifications, was many 
dmes taken by English buccaneers. The most desperate and 
successful of these assaults was that carried out by the redoubt- 
able Morgan in 1668, In some respects the most remarkable 
capture of Porto Bello was effected by Admiral Vernon in 1739. 
On the outbreak of the War of Jenkins' Ear Admiral Vernon 
was dispatched with a serviceable fleet to the West Indies. He 
at once made for Porto Bello. Porto Bello held a fond and 
romantic place in the British mind, It was on the Spanish Main. 
It rang with stirring tales of pirates and with the exploits of such 
heroes as Drake, Coxon and Morgan. Every schoolboy adored 
Porto Bello. Moreover it was believed to be stacked roof-high 



"GROG'S" VICTORY. 341 

with treasure of a very costly kind, and to be defended in a way 
which was both fearful and wonderful. The Plate fleet anchored 
there, so that it was altogether a very terrible place. 

Admiral Vernon, who was five and fifty years of age when 
he started upon this daring venture against the city of Apollyon, 
was known throughout the fleet as " Old Grog." He received 
this nickname because he wore a boat cloak made of grogram, 
which same notable item in his wardrobe led to the addition 
of a word to the English tongue. In 1740 he issued an order 
that the rum served out to the men should be mixed with 
water. This edict, although sound in physiological principle, 
involved a meddling with the sailor's most sacred asset and so was 
not popular in the foc'sle. The men called the mixture "grog," 
and grog it has been to this day, as the dictionaries will testify. 

Now the taking of Porto Bello proved to be a very trivial 
affair. The Spaniards had no suspicion of Vernon's coming. 
Their forts were neglected, their ramparts in decay, most of the 
guns were dismounted, the store of ammunition was small, and 
the garrison had been greatly reduced in numbers by yellow fever. 
The Iron Castle on the north of the inlet was battered by the ships 
and promptly silenced. The men then landed to attack the Stone 
Castle by the town. They climbed in through the gun embrasures 
by standing upon one another's shoulders, like a party of mis- 
chievous boys. They met with practically no resistance, for the 
town capitulated readily enough, and the vigour of the defence 
may be judged from the fact that in this assault the total number 
of the British killed amounted to four. 

In due course the news came home that Porto Bello the 
Terrible had fallen. England went incontinently mad with joy 
over the glorious and incredible victory. Think of it as the 
news was read out ! " Porto Bello captured ! The Iron Castle 
battered into ruins ! The Stone Fort stormed ! The town in the 
hands of the English ! " There was a general rejoicing through 
the length and breadth of the land : flags were hoisted on every 
pole, shouting mobs filled the streets, while every village tavern 
was crowded with men clamouring for tankards of ale in which to 



342 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

drink the health of the gallant admiral. More than that, count- 
less addresses of congratulation were sent to the King. London 
conferred upon the admiral the freedom of the City, while both 
Houses of Parliament voted him their admiring thanks. Eveiy 
public-house that happened to be building at the time was 
named the " Vernon's Head," and any row of new houses in a 
town became forthwith " Porto Bello Terrace " or " Vernon Place." 

Last of all, in order that the people might be able to hand 
down to their sons and grandsons the memory of this splendid 
victory, numerous medals were struck. They bore on one side 
the figure of the admiral and the inscription — " He took Porto 
Bello with six ships." It is to be feared that in time the be- 
medalled folk discerned some sarcasm in this terse sentence, when 
they came to know that he might just as well have taken Porto 
Bello with one ship. 

In the National Portrait Gallery is a picture by Gainsborough 
of a meek, flabby old gentleman, in a cherry-coloured velvet coat 
with cambric frills about the wrists. Beneath in bold letters are 
the words " The Hero of Porto Bello." 



LXVIII. 

HOW DRAKE WRESTLED WITH THE SHADOW. 

Porto Bello is memorable as the burial-place of that most 
adventurous of British seamen, Sir Francis Drake, while to the 
east of the point is the Gulf of Darien, where was laid the scene 
of a strange and characteristic episode in his life. 

Drake was a man of strong will, who, when once he had bent 
his mind to a task, cut his way to the goal through every barrier 
and crushed with a hand of iron whomsoever opposed him in 
his resolve. Each venture that he undertook he pursued with 
a determination as dogged as fate, and with a patient, buoyant 
obstinacy that knew not failure. After the disaster at San Juan 
d'Ulloa, in which Drake shared, he vowed to undermine the power 
of Spain in the West Indies. He set about this labour with cold- 
blooded precision. There was to be no mad rushing upon the foe. 
The scheme of attack must first be perfect in every detail. He 
made two preliminary voyages to the Indies to spy out the 
country, to find points for landing, to make for himself a safe base 
from which to strike. 

In certain secret harbours on the Main he established store- 
houses and forts, as well as the rudiments of a dockyard. He 
took out pinnaces in sections so that they could be pieced together 
and launched in quiet creeks. On a beach hitherto untrodden by 
man he set up a blacksmith's forge, with anvil and bench and 
a supply of coals from Plymouth. His stores and his provisions 
were unsurpassed in excellence. He picked his men with 
prudence and would have none but the best. He forgot nothing, 
omitted nothing. So careful was he of the health of his crew that 
many assume him to have possessed a specific against scurvy, 



344 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The men were not only well fed, but well clothed, while they were 
armed with a completeness which would put a battleship to shame. 
Before he had hoisted his banner he had made himself, to the best 
of his knowledge, invincible. He fought the Indians ; he fought 
the Spaniards ; he slashed a road through the thickest jungle ; he 
battled his way through the wildest gale. In a land barren of 
food he defied starvation ; in a land of sweltering heat he defied 
the sun. 

In that voyage in which he made his first attack upon the 
coast he took his brothers John and Joseph with him. John was 
killed in 1572 when boarding a Spanish frigate. In January 1573 
Drake was hiding in one of his secret harbours in the Gulf of 
Darien, making preparations for the foray on the Isthmus. While 
in this pleasant haven a new enemy appeared, an enemy he had 
never before come upon — the yellow fever. His men fell sick one 
after the other, suddenly and mysteriously. Not a day went by 
but some sturdy sailor was buried in the sands. It was a 
spectacle terrible to contemplate. Two jovial Devon lads, for 
example, as strong as bullocks, would be playing bowls on the 
beach in the cool of the evening. In four days' time upon that 
very beach they would be stretched out dead. 

At last his brother Joseph sickened and died. Then Drake's 
masterful spirit arose. He would fight this invisible enemy as he 
had fought the Spaniards and the Maroons. He would wrestle 
with death. He would wring from the very dead the secret of this 
craven foe who struck in the dark. Such was his set purpose that 
he ordered the doctor to dissect before his eyes the corpse of his 
brother. The loathsome operation was performed in a palm hut, 
by the sands no doubt, while Drake stood by with clenched teeth. 
The sickening details of the autopsy are set down in the log of the 
voyage, but there was nothing revealed that gave a clue as to how 
the evil could be gripped and strangled. For once Drake had 
met with a foe who was more than his match. The doctor himself 
died four days after the examination was completed. 

It was a strange and terrible drama. As Hercules wrestled 
with Death for the body of Alcestis, so, on the palm-lined shore of 



HOW DRAKE WRESTLED WITH THE SHADOW. 345 

this blue creek, the strong man Drake wrestled with Death for the 
lives of his comrades. By the time he sailed forth from this 
haunted haven into the open sea only forty-four men were left 
out of a crew of seventy- three. 

Sir Francis Drake's last voyage was — as has already been 
said ^ — a voyage of failure and disaster. His old friend, Sir John 
Hawkins, had died off Puerto Rico. Drake had been repulsed at 
San Juan. He made attacks upon certain towns along the Spanish 
Main, but gained little save disappointment from the venture. 
Drake, now fifty-five years of age, was failing in strength and 
energy day by day. "As his end drew near the scenes of his 
youth seemed to call him with an irresistible voice." ^ He must go 
to Nombre de Dios where he had made his famous landing just 
twenty-three years ago. He went, but Nombre de Dios was 
empty and deserted. He sent a company across the Isthmus 
along the Panama road, but a few days later they came running 
back into the town in full retreat and utterly disheartened. 
This was a blow Drake found hard to bear. " Then it was," 
writes Corbett, " that the undaunted heart began to wax cold. 
The jovial face grew sombre. The cheery smile, to which his 
men had ever been accustomed to look for light in the darkest 
hours, had faded, and failure began to haunt him, as he recognised 
how the terror of his name had changed the Indies. The seas 
were deserted, the ports bristled with guns, and feverish wakeful- 
ness had supplanted the old dreamy security." 

Leaving Nombre de Dios he started off on a mad expedition 
to the Mosquito Gulf, where he was compelled to take shelter 
behind a small desert island called Escudo de Veragua, some ten 
miles from the mainland. It is flat and tree-covered, with reddish- 
brown cliffs. These cliffs have been separated from the island, 
here and there forming small islets, " some of which have been 
pierced through, and the arches, being crowned by dense foliage 
and trees from seventy to eighty feet high, have a most remark- 
able and picturesque appearance."^ The anchorage is on the 

' Page 218. * Sir Francis Drake, by Julian Corbett, page 204 : London, 1901. 

* The West India Pilot, vol. i. page 292. 



346 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

south-western side of the island, where the land is low and swampy 
and the supply of water very scant. In this unhealthy place Drake 
— now prostrate with dysentery — hung on day after day in the 
hope that with a change of wind he could press on to the west. 
His men were dying one after the other. The water they drank 
was putrid, the air they breathed was fever-laden, for they had 
crept into a veritable hiding-place of death. The admiral was 
lying in his cot too feeble to move, but it was not until another 
week had gone by that he would consent to weigh anchor and 
turn towards home. 

In seven days after leaving the island the fleet anchored off 
Porto Bello. It was on the morning of January 28, 1596. Drake 
had long sunk into a state of semi-consciousness. On the dawn 
of this day something roused him. It may have been the tramp 
of men overhead shortening sail, or the rattle of the chain in the 
hawse-pipe as the anchor ran out. He raised himself in his cot — 
g, shrunken ghost of a man — and then it would seem there came 
upon him for the first time the knowledge that he was dying. 

Die he would not ! He had fought every foe he had ever met. 
He would fight Death too. He sat up : he called for his clothes : 
he railed : he mocked at the coming Shadow. His trembling 
servant dressed him, sighing to see the once great wrists turned to 
the wrists of a child and the sturdy limbs shrivelled to no more 
than bones. The master would put on his best tunic and his lace 
collar, his shoulder ribbons and his last new swordbelt and sword. 
He would now walk out upon the quarter-deck to show the crew 
that Francis Drake was ready to lead them still. One step and 
it was his last. He was lifted back to his bed, and there, clad as 
he would have been on the eve of a battle, the great sea-captain 
died. 

He was buried a league out to sea, and on either side of him 
were sunk one of his own ships and his last taken Spanish prizes, j 
The mail steamer as it follows the coast must pass over the very 
spot 

It was just such a resting-place as his heart would desire and 
in just such company would he wish to be. Landwards stretches 



HOW DRAKE WRESTLED WITH THE SHADOW. 347 

the scene of his early exploits, for Porto Bello lies here open to 
the tide, while, round the cape is the haven of Nombre de Dios. 
The beauty of the spot is unsurpassed. It is ever summer time 
on these high wolds. The hills that creep down to the beach are 
as green as the hills of Devon. The sea is an iris-blue, and when 
the wind is still there is never a sound to be heard but that of the 
rollers breaking on the reef. 



348 THE CRADLE OF THE DEER 



n 



LXIX. 

CARTAGENA HARBOUR. 

Some twenty-two hours suffice for the passage from Colon to 
Cartagena, the most wonderful and picturesque city on the 
Spanish Main. As first seen, when approached from the south, it 
may be a city fashioned by enchantment. A ridge of low hills 
comes down to the sea, to a point far out from the land, where 
they glide imperceptibly into the deep. Beyond the spot at which 
the land seems to have ended is a faint white city floating on the 
water, illusive and ineffable, a place of ghostly walls and towers as 
unsubstantial as a cloud. The whole fabric is colourless, and 
such is the glamour of the sea that the unreal city seems to be 
almost transparent. 

Cartagena cannot be approached directly from the ocean, 
owing to the rocks along the shore and the heavy surf which runs 
perpetually upon the ness. It is reached by a great lagoon, or 
inland sea, lying to the south of it. There are two entrances into 
this lagoon : the one nearer to the town is the Boca Grande, but it 
is too shallow for any but small boats ; the other entrance is the 
Boca Chica, which is far away from the city to the very south of 
the inland sea. Between the two Bocas is the island of Tierra 
Bomba, which forms a sea barrier over four miles in length. 
Between the Boca Grande and the city is a narrow spit of land 
which Drake has m,ade famous. (See Map.) 

The sheet of water thus separated from the open sea by the 
island and the strip of land is eight miles long, and is divided 
naturally into three harbours : the Outer, which occupies the major 
part of the lagoon ; the Middle, which is the modern harbour ; and 
the Inner, a small, shallow basin under the walls of the town. 



CARTAGENA HARBOUR. 349 

At the entrance of the Boca Chica is a massive and grizzled 
fort of white stone — the Fort San Fernando. It is on the end 
of Tierra Boraba island and is much overgrown by bushes, 
for it is of great age. Its dignified water gate, its many gun 
embrasures and its stone sentry boxes give it a brave look as 
the haven is entered. On the opposite side of the channel, on a 
small island, is the ancient Fort of San ]os6. Happily these 
defences, were not in existence in Drake's time, when he entered 
the harbour in open boats, captured a frigate, and towed her 
away out of sheer bravado and light-heartedness. 

The wide, land-locked bay, or Outer Harbour, with its palm- 
covered islands, its many capes and its blue-green water, is very 
beautiful. At the end is the town, still eight miles off, but more 
clearly to be viewed. It lies on a flat seemingly in the sea, with 
only the sky behind it, a fantastic fabric of brown-grey walls, of 
domes and steeples, of towers and chocolate-coloured roofs. Where 
the town joins to the land is a conical hill of rock — a kind of 
acropolis — on the summit of which is a black fort of forbidding 
aspect, overgrown with green and showing ruinous breaches in 
its walls. This is Fort Lazar, which successfully resisted an 
attack of the English during the siege of 1739. Some way further 
landwards is another hill, also conical and bare, but precipitous 
and of immense size, reaching indeed to the height of 510 feet. 
This is La Popa, on the summit of which is a venerable convent. 

Before reaching the Middle Harbour the Boca Grande is passed, 
lying away to the left. The opening into the Middle Harbour 
is narrow, being wedged between Castillo Grande Point on the 
left or west side and a spur of Manzanilla Island on the right. 
The Spaniards in times of panic were apt to sink vessels in this 
entrance, the keels and ribs of which rotting deep in the mud may 
well have added to the present straitness of the way. The Inner 
Harbour is so small and so shallow — having a depth of no more 
than from one to two fathoms — as to be available only for minor 
craft. It was defended at its entrance by the Pastelillo Fort, the 
fine ruins of which are still to be seen. The steamer comes along- 
side a pier at the city end of the Middle Harbour. This haven, 



350 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

as already stated, is separated from the open sea by a spit of low 
land, which stretches from the town walls to the Boca Grande. 
From the part it played in the year i S 86 it may well be called 
Drake's Spit. A railway now runs along it from the steamer pier 
to the city, so that passengers must needs pass over that part which 
separates the Inner Harbour from the Caribbean Sea. 

Drake's Spit is made up of a rough beach, a thick growth 
of mangroves, and a number of cocoa-nut palms. The story of 
Drake's Spit is as follows. After the capture of San Domingo in 
1586 (page 251) Drake made his way to Cartagena. He entered 
the great harbour through the Boca Chica {i.e. through the present 
steamer entrance) " without any resistance of ordnance or other 
impeachment." This was at four in the afternoon. He made his 
way up the harbour as far as the Boca Grande. When night came 
on he sent off a party of sailors under Martin Frobisher to attack 
Fort Pastelillo, which then stood, as it still stands, at the mouth of 
the Inner Harbour. The fort was very strong and the attack failed, 
as Drake assumed it would, for this was a mere feint in order to 
withdraw the attention of the Spaniards from the real assault on 
the town. 

This assault was led by Carleil, who had so distinguished 
himself at San Domingo. Carleil landed his soldiers at the end 
of the spit where it abuts on the Boca Grande. This narrow strip 
of beach and bush is about two and a quarter miles in length. 
The men advanced along the shore in silence, under the cover of 
the trees and the darkness of the night. The last half mile of the 
spit, where it comes between the Inner Harbour and the sea, and 
where the railway from the pier now runs in peace, is very narrow. 
As the English neared this point they were discovered by some 
mounted scouts, who promptly galloped off to alarm the garrison. 
Across the narrow part the buccaneers found that a wall had been 
built, with a staked ditch in front of it. There was a gap in the 
wall to allow the horsemen to pass in, but the entry was already 
blocked by gabions in the form of wine butts filled with earth. 
Behind the wall were six demi-culverins and sakers, and a force 
of 300 men armed with muskets and pikes. Moreover, two 



CARTAGENA HARBOUR. 351 

great galleys, drawn up on the harbour beach, were manned by 
a company of soldiers who could command the passage with their 
firearms. Every gun was trained upon the spit. 

As Carleil advanced, the Spaniards poured a torrent of shot 
upon the narrow way. The British kept silence and never fired. 
They crawled along the water's edge so as to be out of range until 
they were close under the wall. Then, at a given signal, they 
made a rush for the gap through the blizzard of bullets. Down 
went the wine butts like ninepins. A volley was fired in the very 
face of the horrified defenders of the breach, and with a yell the 
English fell upon them with pike and cutlass. Carleil with his 
own hand cut down the standard-bearer. The Spaniards without 
more ado turned heel and fled, helter-skelter, for the city. As 
Thomas Cates, who wrote a chronicle of the fight, modestly 
explains, " our pikes were longer than theirs." 

The British tore after them like a pack of baying wolves. The 
flying crowd made an attempt to stand but were swept down, 
so that the men of the long pikes had to leap over their bodies. 
" We gave them no leisure to breathe," says Master Cates with 
great relish. In a moment the market-place was gained, but every 
street leading from it was blocked with earthworks. Over these 
mounds went the Spaniards and the buccaneers after them, as if it 
were a hurdle-race. Behind each barricade Indians were posted 
with poisoned arrows, but Drake's men jumped on their backs or 
their heads as they crouched, and gave them a taste of the long 
pikes if they had the heart to stand. Poisoned stakes had been 
driven into the ground " to run into one's feet," but as the 
Spaniards stumbled over them in their terror the pursuers had 
something soft to tread upon. 

Women hurled stones, pots, and jugs out of windows ; a 
musket would blaze through a loophole in a gate ; figures in night 
attire crouched in archways or fled into the gloom shrieking 
wildly. Every dog in the town was barking as if possessed, while 
drums beat the alarm without ceasing. Whenever a stand was 
made by the garrison the pikes charged, and the breathless 
Cartagenians, scattered and bleeding, bolted down dark alleys or 



352 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 

hid under carts. In one of these street fights the Spanish 
commander was taken by Captain Goring, " after the said captain 
had first hurt him with his sword." This is gently put, for the 
captain, being no weakling, may be assumed to have well-nigh 
cleft the commander in two when he " hurt him." 

The town was taken and taken handsomely ; the fort that had 
defied Frobisher was seized and blown up, and, after a pleasant 
stay in Cartagena of six weeks — during which time Drake enter- 
tained the governor and bishop at dinner — that officer departed 
with 110,000 ducats in his pocket. 

Another interesting attack upon Cartagena was made in 1741 
by Admiral Vernon, otherwise known as " Old Grog," or the Hero 
of Porto Bello. The admiral, after he had sufficiently enjoyed his 
triumph at Porto Bello (page 342), proceeded to Cartagena, but 
found that city by no means in a yielding mood. The Boca Chica 
was blocked by a heavy boom, anchored across the channel 
between Fort San Fernando and Fort San Josd Moored behind 
the boom were four very solid ships of the line. On either side of 
the entrance numerous entrenchments had been thrown up to 
withstand a landing. 

The land forces were under the command of General Went- 
worth. The general and the admiral spent a considerable part of 
each day in quarrelling. Wentworth wanted to do things in his 
own way, and when he was thwarted he was apt to sulk. Vernon, 
on the other hand, used " unbecoming language " to Wentworth, 
and was generally " boisterous and overbearing," as became the 
hero of Porto Bello. In spite of this war of words the outposts on 
either side of the Boca Chica were taken very gallantly, and then 
the bombardment of Fort San Fernando began. This stronghold, 
which mounted no less than eighty-two cannons and three mortars, 
was finally breached. A force was landed and the fortress 
captured, with the loss of only one man on the side of the English. 
The Spanish scuttled three of the ships which were anchored 
behind the boom, while the invaders seized the fourth. The boom 
was broken up and the fleet sailed into the harbour. 

On April i (a somewhat appropriate date) Admiral Vernon 



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CARTAGENA HARBOUR. 353 

wrote home to announce that he had captured Fort San Fernando. 
Once more the. people of England went mad with excitement. It 
was Porto Bello all over again. Ballads were composed, and sung 
in the streets, with the refrain " Vernon the Scourge of Spain." 
More medals were struck. One of these shows the Scourge in a 
kind of garden-party dress, strolling boldly in front of the city. 
On the rim of the medal is the inscription " Admiral Vernon 
viewing the town of Carthagena." ^ There was an unrealised 
amount of truth in this posy, for the admiral did little more than 
view the city during his sojourn. He never captured it. 

The fleet moved up into the Middle Harbour. The Spaniards 
had abandoned the Castillo Grande, had blown up the fort on 
Manzanilla point, and had sunk two ships in the channel, according 
to their custom on these occasions. The siege of the town went 
on very slowly, as Vernon and Wentworth were so much engaged 
in fighting between themselves that they had little time to devote 
to the Spaniards. 

One month after the fleet had appeared off the Boca Chica a 
force of 1500 men was landed to attack Fort San Lazar — the fort 
on the rocky acropolis. The assault was made just before day- 
break, but affairs at headquarters were so mismanaged that the 
English were repulsed with the loss of 179 killed, 459 wounded 
and 16 taken prisoners. During the progress of these events 
yellow fever broke out in the fleet, with the result that no less 
than 500 men died, while over 1000 were lying sick. 

A final council of war was held on the flag-ship, which ended 
in the usual manner. Vernon, after more " unbecoming language," 
dashed out of the cabin in a rage, slamming the door after him. 
The land forces were withdrawn as useless, and then the Scourge 
of Spain proceeded to show the world — and especially Wentworth 
— what the Navy could do, unaided and alone. The perverse old 
gentleman warped a prize, the Galicia, as near to the town as 
he could. She carried sixteen guns and was fortified with earth 
and sand. The Galicia fired fretfully at the city for seven long 
hours by the cathedral clock. The city, of course, replied, and 
• The Royal Navy, by Laird Clowes, vol. iii. 

A A 



354 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

with such effect that the poor earth-laden ship was riddled with 
holes, so that she had to cut her cables and be abandoned. In 
this fatuous attempt the admiral lost sixty-two stout mariners. 

After these various exhibitions of strength the Scourge of 
Spain pulled up his anchors and sailed out into the Caribbean 
Sea. 



LXX. 

THE CITY OF CARTAGENA. , , 

Cartagena, the sea-environed city, the city of unforgotten 
centuries, is a place of surprising charm. The sun and the wind 
have bleached it, the rain has dappled the sheltered wall with tints 
of madder and grey, but it remains yet a fine memorial of the 
gorgeous days of Spain. It is, indeed, an older-looking Spanish 
town than any in Castile, for there is so little within its compass 
that is really new. It is like a piece of sumptuous tapestry which 
the bungling of the irreverent needle has failed to spoil. 

An immense wall, which is especially formidable along the 
sea-front, surrounds the city on all sides. This wall, where it has 
escaped the sun, is almost black. Curious weeds have crept over 
it, while plants in flower and even bushes grow here and there m 
the gaps between the stones. It is made strong by bastions and 
outworks, is dignified by high battlements and sentry towers 
of stone, is overshadowed by many palms, and presents within 
its girth steep stairs and echoing passages. The main entrance 
to the city is through a handsome gateway of yellow stone, 
surmounted by a steeple, and flanked by pillars. It presents three 
openings — a central arch for the mule teams, and two small side 
entries for folk who walk. These lead into the principal square, 
the Plaza de los Coches, where the houses are built over a shady 
colonnade of many arches and of no mean age. In the shadows 
of this passage are incongruous shops, gay with the tints of bright 
shawls and silks, or of tropical fruits. It is a place too for the 
hot, drowsy bodega, with its casks, its tables and benches, as well 
as for the lolling cigarette-smoker whom one would not be 
surprised to find clad as a toreador. 



3S6 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

The narrow streets when in shade are as dark as a way in a 
wood, but when the sun pours along them they are dazzling to 
discomfort. The roads are for the most part ruinous and full of 
ruts and holes. They are muffled as to sound, however, owing to 
the custom of throwing odd garbage into the street, as well as to 
the fact that not a few are as thick in sand and dust as a dry 
beach. This dust is apt to be converted into mud by the copious 
slop-water which the housewife empties into the road. A few 
carts creak and groan through the town, but most of those who 
ride ride on donkeys or mules, and on the mule pack much of the 
merchandise of the place is carried. There is little, therefore, to 
break the silence of the road but the patter of hoofs, the laughter 
of handsome Spanish women who lean from verandahs, the clatter 
of a cracked church bell, or the twang of a guitar. 

The houses are mostly of two stories, with white or yellow 
walls, or walls of a dubious colour that would be called " faded." 
They are in various stages of decay, so that it would seem as if the 
dust in the street might be due to fallen plaster and crumbling 
stone. The buildings, large or small, are very lavish in balconies, 
which are often of bright tints, showing, it may be, a green roof, 
a lilac wall, and white railings. Some are most beautifully 
carved ; while the many which are of stone or ancient iron-work 
are remarkably picturesque. In certain of the narrower lanes the 
balconies on opposite sides of the way project so far as almost to 
meet overhead. Curious bow windows supported on white stone 
corbels are common, as also are window gratings or grilles of 
metal or elaborate wood-work. Stone gateways closed by heavy 
doors knobbed with brass are come upon, as well as lofty 
buildings which would have been palaces when the city was in its 
glory. Here and there is a peep into a courtyard with green 
bushes in it, a shaded well, and a little balcony looking down 
upon the quiet of it all. An unexpected tower will be met with, 
or a fort which has been turned into a dwelling-house, or an 
arcade of fine pillars with no apparent reason for its existence. 

High above all, against the hard sky, are the ample roofs of a 
tropical city, brown roofs and red roofs, whose covering of tiles is 



THE CITY OF CARTAGENA. 357 

as deeply ridged as is a newly ploughed field, and whose colour is 
enhanced in many spots by the green crest of a palm tree. There 
are several ancient churches in the city, certain of which are 
remarkably beautiful. The old cathedral is worth a long journey 
to see. It contains a hundred features of interest, from the great 
studded door to the magnificent altar-piece. It affords, better 
than any other building in Cartagena, some conception of the 
hauteur and wealth of Spain when she was the mistress of the 
New World. 

The Fort San Lazar, which resisted the attack of Admiral 
Vernon in 1 741, is outside the walls, on the level ground between 
the city and La Popa Hill. It is placed on the crown of an 
isolated, rocky hill 125 feet in height. The sides are heavily 
scarped and show two tiers of stone works. The place was 
described in Vernon's time as a square fort, having three 
demi-bastions, two guns on each face, one on each flank, and 
three in each curtain. It is now a deserted, crumbling and 
picturesque ruin. The ramparts, reached by a steep rock road, 
are built of narrow red bricks, covered with plaster or faced with 
stone. The platform on the summit is almost filled with bushes 
and weeds. Here is a solid guard-room, a glum, black mass, 
with an immensely thick roof. At the corners of the square 
are sentry towers, each surmounted by a cupola. Brick stairs 
lead down to a tunnel cut in the rock, which passage opens upon 
the lower platform of the fortress. 

The view from the parapets is most fascinating. To the south 
are the harbour with the water battery. Fort Pastelillo, at the 
mouth of its inner basin, Drake's Spit and the narrows near the 
Boca Grande. To the east are La Popa and its convent. To 
the west lies, at one's feet, the whole of the walled city of 
Cartagena, a marvellous spectacle to contemplate. Beyond and 
far to the north is the sea. 

It would have been good to have stood on this hill when 
Drake sailed by in 1573, on his way to Plymouth after his 
successful foray. In the harbour at that time were lying the 
great Plate ships and their convoy of men-of-war on the eve 



358 THE CRAbLE OF THE DEEP. 

of departing for Spain. Drake, out of sheer devilment and 
buoyancy of spirits, must needs stand close in, and " then run 
by before the whole fleet with the flag of St. George waving 
defiance at his masthead, and his silken pennants and ensigns 
floating down to the water to bid them a mocking farewell." ^ 

* Sir Francis Drake, by Julian Corbett, page 46 : London, 1901. 



LXXI. 

OFF TO THE FRONT. 

The next place touched at after Cartagena is Puerto Colombia 
A spot less dull is hardly to be conceived. It consists of a long, 
bulbous-ended pier which has been shot out into the blue like 
a chameleon's tongue. The pier is embellished with a railway, 
and at its land extremity is a small, depressed village. These 
objects deposited in a barren and featureless bay represent Puerto 
Colombia. 

Made fast to the pier, however, was an object of considerable 
interest. It was a gun-boat belonging to the Republic of Colombia. 
Certain hasty and thoughtless passengers mistook this battleship 
at first sight for a tramp steamer. The commander or admiral 
was an Englishman. He had done his best to bring the vessel 
up to British conceptions of trimness, but at the moment the work 
was one which might have daunted Hercules after his experience 
of the Augean stables. The presence of the man-of-war was due 
to the fact that a revolution was pending or in actual progress, and 
troops were in consequence being hurried to the front. Indeed 
the last contingent of 150 men were about to embark that very 
evening. 

In a while the 150 soldiers made their appearance. They 
came up to the pier-head by train in open trucks. Out 
of the trucks they tumbled, and lined up on the landing stage 
to await the roll-call. It is worthy to note that these men, 
although just off to the front, were not only all sober but 
all very quiet. So far as any enthusiasm was concerned they 
might have been on their way to gaol. They were a mixture of 



36o THE CRADLE OF THE DEER 

Mulattoes and white men, and, in the point of physique, were 
a very presentable body of young fellows. There was nothing 
military about them, nor did they appear to have been at any time 
over-troubled by drilling. 

They wore the ordinary every-day dress of the streets and 
the fields. Some had donned cotton jackets, some blouses or 
"jumpers," a few paraded in cloth coats. One man was con- 
spicuous in what had evidently been a tweed suit, while another 
looked very smart in an old black dinner jacket. In the matter of 
trousers also the regiment served to demonstrate how greatly 
fashion and individual tastes may vary in the matter of clothes. 
Some wore slippers, others the shoe of the country, and a few the 
common European boot. Straw hats were evidently more or less 
en regie, although a number of the men-at-arms wore rakish felt 
hats or sombreros. They of course all carried firearms. Many 
of these weapons were of interest by reason of their antiquity. 
Taken together they would have formed a fairly exhaustive 
display illustrative of the evolution of the modern rifle from its 
rude beginnings. Some of the soldiers carried their ammunition 
in bandoliers, but the larger number used pouches or bags — game 
bags, fishing bags, school bags. 

String was very largely employed in the equipment of these 
soldiers, and indeed without string the more fragmentary of the 
men would have fallen to pieces. Their badges of rank, however, 
were attached to their arms by means of pins, string not being 
efficient for this purpose. The men who were most anxious to 
make themselves really dashing carried towels round their necks. 
Each warrior was encumbered by a bundle in which were a mat, 
a blanket, and, I assume, a change of raiment. Many, however, 
had added to the bundle a kettle or a cooking pot, a bottle or two 
suspended by strings or a guitar. These defenders of their country 
looked indeed rather like a parcel of lads just off to a boys' holiday 
camp. 

The officer in charge of the company was a remarkable person, 
of astounding activity and red-hot military zeal. On his head was 
a large Panama hat, fixed to his coat by means of a heavy string. 



OFF TO THE FRONT. 361 

He wore black dress trousers. On his feet were brown shoes such 
as may have graced the sands of Blackpool. The chief item of 
his costume, however, was a bright blue jacket, adorned with 
immense frogs fashioned out of black braid. This coat had 
evidently been obtained either from a circus master or the con- 
ductor of a seaside band. It was the kind of tunic usually worn 
by lion-tamers. The officer had a large bath towel round* his 
neck with which he occasionally mopped his face, as the weather 
was very hot. From a luggage strap across his shoulder was 
suspended a lady's hand-bag, or reticule, in brown leather. Had 
it not been distinctly a lady's bag it would have suggested the 
pouch in which a bus conductor carries his coppers. This was 
no doubt a sort of sabretache for carrying dispatches and the 
like. 

It remains to be mentioned that, attached by string to his 
" suspenders " — which were very conspicuous — this leader of men 
wore a rapier, or slender sword, with a gilded handle, such as 
is carried at levies in England. This weapon was no doubt ob- 
tained from the same source as the lion-tamer's tunic. Although 
quite hoarse with previous shouting the officer, thus equipped for 
active service, gave his orders with explosive vigour. He even 
addressed the men with no little spirit and emotion, wiping his 
face with the bath towel between each eloquent period. He was 
probably on the theme of " death or glory," and was making such 
references to " hearths and homes " as are applicable to the tropics 
where there are no fireplaces. It was a relief to the onlookers that 
he did not draw his lev6e- dress sword in order to point the way 
to victory, for as he had a practice of waving his arms like a 
semaphore he might have done some hurt. 

The concluding item of the parade, before the fighting men 
actually started for the front, was the roll-call. The officer had 
the names written down in a penny account-book, from which he 
read with precision, glancing up inquiringly after each name had 
been jerked forth. None having been found wanting he made a 
graceful bow, as if he had just sung a song, dropped the account 
book into the hand-bag, and retired behind a crane to mop his face 



362 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

with a thoroughness which had been denied him while in the 
public gaze. 

It was interesting to think that these soldiers were the 
successors, and possibly in some cases the descendants, of the 
very men who had defended the Spanish Main against Drake and 
Morgan, who had convoyed the mule trains, and who had fought 
behind the stockades at Nombre de Dios and the walls of 
Cartagena. 



LXXII. 

THE SARGASSO SEA. 

After leaving Puerto Colombia the steamer touches at La 
Guayra, where was " the low white house, two or three hundred 
feet up the steep mountain side," where Amyas Leigh and his 
brother had word with the Rose of Torridge. The ship puts in 
again at Trinidad and Barbados, and then shapes her course for 
home. " Home ! " as Hawkins once wished, " with a good large 
wind." " Home ! " as Drake once cried, " for our voyage is made." 
We are to call at the Azores on the way to England, and so 
must pass across the Sargasso Sea. This remarkable piece of 
water lies in the centre of the North Atlantic, a tideless pool 
almost equal in area to the continent of Europe. It lies encircled 
by the Great Equatorial Current and the Gulf Stream, which ever 
sweep around its untroubled depths. It is an oasis in the heart of 
the whirling ocean, a place of sanctuary, a dead sea. Its name is 
derived from the curious amber-coloured weed, the sargasso, with 
which its surface is covered and through which the steamer 
ploughs its way. The weed carries a number of grape-like berries 
on its branches, while each clump affords a shelter to endless 
parasites, to minute fishes and tiny crabs. The source of this 
strange, wandering, rootless plant is not fully known. It is cast 
into the pool by the Gulf Stream as it hurries northwards. Some 
believe that the sargasso is torn from the rocks about the Gulf of 
Mexico, from the shores of Florida and the Bahamas, and that it 
is drawn from the Stream into the great still eddy. Others affirm 
that the weed — whatever its origin — grows and multiplies in the 
sea in the course of its aimless drifting to and fro. The largest 
collection of the plant is found just south-west of the Azores, and 
those who maintain its source to be from the land state that it 



364 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

will need six months to float from Florida to these far-away 
islands. 

This weed-strewn sea seemed strangely beautiful as we made 
our way across it. The light-blue sky was edged along the 
horizon with countless fleecy clouds. There came from the south 
a gentle following wind. The water was a deep indigo colour, 
every wrinkle, curve and dip of which was polished bright as if its 
surface were moulded out of purple metal. Here and there a fleck 
of white foam marked the summit of an ocean furrow. The weed 
when first seen appeared in the form of long bright lines of plum 
yellow, streaking the blue and following the trend of the wind. 
In a while the streaks turned into clusters or islands, which made 
an amber dome on the crest of the wave and an amber cup in 
its hollow. These masses varied from a few feet to a few yards 
across, and they floated past like floes of yellow ice. The in- 
dividual weeds, when examined closer, looked fresh and brilliant, 
so that the whole sea might have been littered with a drift of cut 
flowers. Further on were larger islets that covered an acre or 
more, great sponge-coloured tracts whose undulating ridges 
sparkled in the sun. One writer has compared these floating 
fields to an inundated meadow full of yellow flowers, and the 
comparison is very apt.^ 

Other things than weeds find their way into this stagnant pool. 
The Sargasso Sea is haunted by derelict ships that have lost both 
master and men, and that, with none to guide them, wander blindly 
through the waste of weed, like weary ghosts seeking a harbour 
that is never gained. In this ocean purgatory they drift uneasily, 
round and round the seasons through, in piteous circles until at 
last the ocean takes them to itself 

In the book just referred to is a chart of the courses followed by 
these sad craft, as noted, from time to time, by passing ships. 
Some of these outcasts have wandered here for long. One schooner, 
the F. E. Wolston, cruised to and fro about this sea for at least 
three years.^ The Gulf Stream would take her in its warm 

• North Atlantic Directory, by A. G. Findlay : London, 1S95. 
» From 1 89 1 to 1894. 



THE SARGASSO SEA. 365 

embrace and carry her gently away to the north. Then the Trade 
Wind would seize her and hurry her south again, to within sight 
of the palms and the coral reefs. She has rested for days in 
the hush of a tropic calm, motionless as a sleeping bird. She has 
fled wildly across the deep before a gale, like a tormented soul 
chased by revengeful spirits. She has sighted many a living ship 
as it passed by, trim and bustling, with cheery passengers leaning 
over the rail, and sailors yarning by the foc'sle gangway. The 
smug captain, after a long look through his glasses, has stepped 
into the chart room to enter the name of the poor homeless waif 
in the log, and the place of his meeting with her. 

Think of the ghostly schooner speeding along before a gentle 
breeze on a moonlight night ! Her masts and her broken spars 
are so white that they may be made of ice. The shining grass on 
her hull flashes in the light as if she were sheathed in emerald. 
The shadows of her jagged bulwarks stretch across decks 
where never is heard the footstep of man. The moonlight falls 
upon the cabin stair, upon the table under the skylight, upon the 
swinging lamp. The locker doors open and shut as the vessel 
heels over, the pilot jacket hanging from a peg is green with 
mould, while in the water which washes to and fro on the cabin 
floor is floating the captain's pipe. . 

On the deck are ever the moan of the creaking rudder, the 
thud of a block against the mast, the clatter of a kettle tossing 
loose in the cook's galley, and from all the black hollows of the 
ship comes the groaning of rotten timbers. The compass in the 
binnacle points now N.E., now E., now S.W. by S., now S. With 
each shift of the wind the vessel turns over wearily, while the 
water spurts out from her weather planks. 

The last call comes on some wild day when the terror of the 
gale is upon her, as she flies down the path of the wind. The seas 
chase her like a pack of hounds, until in the end a great white 
wave, majestic and terrible, falls like an executioner's axe upon 
her quaking deck and her " voyage is made." When the storm 
lifts, it may be that a wreath of golden weed will mark for a while 
the spot beneath which she rests. 



366 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



Lxxni. 

THE VANISHING ISLAND AND THE GIANT WHO DIED TWICE. 

As the Azores are approached the steamer traverses that ocean 
area which was the favourite haunt of the Vanishing Island. This 
island, so full of interest to the ancient mariner, was less definite 
or more careless as to its precise position than are most tracks of 
land. In a French chart, bearing the date 1755, it is placed in 
latitude 2<f N. and longitude 25° W. It was called, for reasons 
which will be explained later, the Isle of St. Brandum, or 
St. Borondam. It was a mountainous island of great physical 
attractions and of some ninety leagues in length. Considering its 
massive size it was curiously shy, for it almost invariably vanished 
when approached by strangers. Some suppose that it flew away, 
like a leaf in a wind ; others were content to affirm that it merely 
disappeared. The matter-of-fact John Sparke, who was one of 
Hawkins' companions in the voyage of 1564, writes, "About these 
parts are certain flitting islands, which have been often-times seen, 
and when men approached near them they vanished." Sparke 
reverently adds, " it would seem that he is not yet born to whom 
God hath appointed the finding of them." 

Innumerable honest folk had, however, seen St. Brandum. 
Among them was Alonzo de Espinosa, the governor of Ferro. 
He issued a statement, supported by the testimony of no less 
than a hundred reliable witnesses, that he had observed the island 
forty leagues to the north-west of Ferro, and, more than that, that 
he and certain of his friends had watched the sun set behind one 
of its capes. 

It was in every way a most desirable island to visit. In the 
first place it was the retreat of King Rodrigo, which many were 



THE VANISHING ISLAND. 367 

curious to see. It contained besides the beautiful palace and 
pleasure gardens of Armida. Readers of Tasso's "Jerusalem 
Delivered" will remember that when the crusaders reached the 
Holy City, Satan employed this lady, who was a professional 
sorceress, to abduct Rinaldo, the valiant leader. Rinaldo was led 
away by Armida to this very island, amidst the delights of which 
he forgot his vow, and the object to which he had devoted his life. 
To rid him of the lady two soldiers from the Christian army, 
named Carlo and Ubaldo, were dispatched to the island, which 
seems then to have been much less timid than it was in later 
years. They took with them a talisman so exceedingly powerful, 
or of such voltage, that the witchcraft of Armida became as 
nought. Rinaldo returned, performed very fearful feats of arms, 
persuaded Armida to become a Christian, and so all ended well. 
Whether it was in consequence of this visit of Carlo and Ubaldo 
that the island became suspicious and took to vanishing on the 
approach of strangers is not known. 

More definite details of St. Brandum are furnished by a 
Portuguese observer, one Pedro Velio. This Pedro was a pilot 
who had the good fortune to take the coy island by surprise and 
actually land upon it. He saw on the sands, as he stepped ashore, 
the prints of gigantic human feet, at least twice the size of a 
man's. This was most important evidence, which fully corrobo- 
rated certain details in the earlier history of the settlement. 
Velio also found on the beach a cross nailed to a tree, the ashes of 
a fire, and the usual properties with which most mysterious islands 
are furnished. Two of his men wandered into the woods, either 
in search of Armida's garden or at least of a tavern patronised by 
the giants. They had not been long away when a breeze sprang 
up. Pedro Velio, after whistling and shouting, was reluctantly 
compelled to push his boat off and make for the ship. He had no 
sooner stepped on board than, turning round, he perceived to his 
horror that the island had disappeared. It does not seem to have 
either sunk into the sea or to have flown away into the air. It 
simply was not. As nothing whatever was to be seen of the 
two men, it is clear that they must have become transparent or 



368 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

at least soluble at the moment that the island faded ; otherwise 
they must have been seen, for an appreciable second, as two black 
dots against the now unobstructed horizon. The disconsolate 
Pedro Velio sailed to and fro for days searching for the island but 
he never came upon it, nor did he find any material of note 
floating upon the sea. It would have been a great comfort to him 
if only he could have picked up the hats his two lost men were 
wearing. 

Many expeditions — some of them very costly and elaborate — 
were sent out from Europe in search of St. Brandum, but the 
adventurers were never blessed by a sight of its diffident shores, 
although the captain of the last exploring party, Don Caspar 
Dominguez, took with him two holy friars, in case Satan should 
be in any way concerned with the island's behaviour. 

It is curious that this very part of the world, which has been 
geographically so much favoured, should have been the habitat 
of another vanishing island of unimpeachable character and 
undoubted bona fides. Just off the most westerly point of 
St. Michael's — a point passed by the steamer — there is marked 
in the chart a shoal, showing fifteen fathoms of water on it, called 
the Sabrina Shoal. On the night of February i, 1811, the 
inhabitants of the west end of St. Michael's were awakened by 
the sound of a fearful explosion at sea, while those who were 
within sight of the point saw rise out of the ocean a column of 
fire and cinders, together with an immense cloud of smoke and 
of flying ash. Inquisitive boatmen who rowed over the site 
of this strange manifestation, when all was still again, picked up 
dead and broiled fish. 

On June 12, 181 1, H.M. sloop Sabrina, when cruising ofif 
St. Michael's, witnessed clouds of smoke rising from the sea near 
the west of the island. The captain of the sloop was filled with 
joy when to the smoke was added a noise as of cannon. He felt 
assured that an engagement was in progress, and set all sail upon 
his ship in the hope that he might reach the scene of the engage- 
ment in time to take part therein. The deck was cleared for 
action and the guns run out. On nearing the spot, however, 



THE VANISHING ISLAND. 369 

there was only to be seen an immense body of smoke revolving 
on the water horizontally m varied and tortured convolutions. 
Suddenly out of these coils shot up a hideous column of water, 
stones, cinders and steam, attended by loud explosions and the 
flashing of lightning. It was evident that they had come upon 
a submarine volcano. The phenomena continued and by June 14, 
to the delight of the curious, the mouth of a crater, still belching 
fire and cinders, rose out of the sea. It rose until it attained the 
height of twenty feet. By June 16 the crater — which was as 
active as ever — had reached an altitude of 150 feet. 

The Sabrinc was compelled to proceed ©n her mission — which 
was not that of watching volcanoes — but came back to the same 
spot again on July 4. She then found a complete volcanic 
island, quiet and pleasant to look upon, for nothing but a faint 
steam now rose from its peak. The height of the island had 
increased to 250 feet. The captain and some of the officers 
landed, stepping out of the boat upon a narrow beach of ashes. 
It must have been a moment never to be forgotten. They found 
the shore steep and the ground hot, while those who had the 
curiosity to climb up to the edge of the crater reported that 
the same was filled with steaming water. The captain walked 
round the newly born island with the assurance that, so far as 
this piece of the world was concerned, he was the first man. 
It was an afternoon walk without a parallel. Some time after 
the sloop had sailed away the island suddenly vanished into the 
sea, leaving nothing to mark its site but the Sabrina Shoal, 
which lies now no less than ninety feet below the level of the 
ocean. 

The vanishing island of the Middle Ages came by its name 
of St. Brandum after this manner. In the sixth century an Irish 
abbot named St. Brandum, a man of very exceptional piety, left 
Limerick or Galway, or some such town, for the purpose of dis- 
covering the islands of Paradise. On this voyage the devout 
Irishman was accompanied by his favourite disciple, St. Malo, 
who was an enthusiast filled with the missionary spirit They 
landed on an island in these waters. The first thing that St. Malo 

B B 



370 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

came upon, after stepping out of the boat, was a sepulchre con- 
taining the body of a dead giant. Without being in any way 
surprised at this uncommon "object of the sea-shore," he proceeded 
at once to resuscitate the deceased native. 

The dead man moved in a while, lifted his head, stared about 
him, and began to ask " where he was." Being reassured by the 
disciple he crawled out of the sepulchre and sat down on the sand, 
arranging his scanty grave clothes about him with a proper 
modesty. He yawned heavily, no doubt, and rubbed his eyes, 
blinking the while for the sun was bright. He would like to have 
heard how things had gone on in his household and in the village 
since his death, but St. Malo would talk of nothing but religion. 
He put the poor, famished giant through a catechism which would 
have daunted a student of divinity. It is stated that, in the 
progress of this discourse, St. Malo obtained from the giant the 
admission that the islanders had some notions of the Trinity, and 
was gratified to find that the great man himself was sound in his 
views as to the torments reserved in Hell for Jews and Pagans. 
It is to be assumed that this highly specialised conversation 
was conducted in Erse or Ancient Irish. After an harangue on 
the doctrines of Christianity which lasted many hours St. Malo 
succeeded in converting the giant, and at once baptised him in the 
name of Mildum. 

One gathers from the records of this mission that Mildum soon 
became bored almost to tears. He found, one may infer, that 
things had not gone on after his death quite as he expected. His 
friends had fled to the hills, his secret store of liquor had been 
looted, and his hut was practically up for sale. Moreover wherever 
he went he would be sure to meet St. Malo, who would at once 
insist upon addressing him, " in a few words," upon such topics 
as Transubstantiation, Original Sin, and the Authority of the 
Church. 

At the end of fifteen days Mildum could stand this no longer. 
So he went to St. Malo, hat in hand, and, while thanking him for 
all he had done during this improving fortnight, begged that he 
might be allowed to die again. St. Malo was not hurt by the 



THE GIANT WHO DIED TWICE. 371 

request. He ascribed it to a creditable eagerness on Mildum's 
part to see those Heavens to which he now had access by reason 
of his conversion. He accordingly gave his permission for the 
giant's second decease. 

With a smile of relief Mildum said " Good-bye ! " and walked 
back to the sepulchre which he had already put in order. Here, 
kicking off his shoes and begging St. Malo to kindly arrange the 
stone as he found it, he crept in and settled himself down, with 
a sigh of great satisfaction, to resume that sleep which the well- 
meaning Irishman had so rudely interrupted. 



3/2 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP 



LXXIV. 

"THE SOUGH OF AN OLD SONG." 

St, Michael's presents itself as a long island with volcanic hills 
at either end, and in the centre a wide monotonous slope sweeping 
down to the sea, at the foot of which lies the town of Ponta 
Delgada, The town is a tumbled mass of white blocks, which, 
when seen from a distance, may be a drift of chalk and red sand- 
stone piled up along the shore. The slope behind it is dotted 
with white houses, which appear as if they were in process of being 
washed down the incline to join the general heap at the bottom. 

The delightful city of Ponta Delgada looks very picturesque 
from the harbour. A black sea-wall rises out of the pool, with 
curious and unsteady houses built along the top of it. Each old 
bastion in this wall has been converted into some sort of semi- 
amphibious cave-dwelling. There is a very ancient fort too, so 
green that it might have been fashioned out of a yew hedge. 
The houses about the haven hang, for the most part, over the sea, 
as if they were being pushed off the land by the weight of the 
town. Behind lies the white city, with its deep red roofs and its 
occasional walls of blue or yellow to temper the glare of it. Out 
of the medley rise towers and steeples, a Norfolk Island pine or 
two, and a hill with a church on the summit of it. The little boat 
harbour is one of the most fascinating features of the place. It may 
have been brought here bodily from Venice. It is overshadowed 
with white and blue houses, beneath which are a colonnade of 
many arches, as well as pillared stairs which lead down to the 
water. Picturesque folk lounge over the parapets, while to the 
sea stair are moored gaudy-coloured boats of an unfamiliar type. 
The way out of this little harbour, towards the town, is through a 



"THE SOUGH OF AN OLD SONG." 373 

noble stone gateway of three arches, elaborately ornamented and 
ablaze with heraldic devices. It bears the date 1783. 

The town itself is bright, clean and cheery, wholesome and 
trim. In the square by the landing-stage is the handsome Matrice 
church, a building of strange and quaint design with a fine fagade 
of carved stone, and with many wondrous works in its interior. 
A still more remarkable and more ancient edifice is the Jesuits' 
church. In many of its features it is probably unique. Without 
it has the aspect of a stately country mansion, within it is as 
elaborately decorated as a Jain temple in India. In the streets 
are numerous old stone houses of much dignity, certain beautiful 
convents and many brightly painted buildings of a humbler kind. 
Mule teams, laden with packs or panniers, are the chief means of 
transport, although donkeys are much affected by the town folk 
and lumbering bullock-waggons by the people from the country. 
Most of the women still wear the dark blue capote, which covers 
them head and foot, as with a monk's cowl and cloak. This dress 
must be one of the most curious extremes ever reached in the 
erratic evolution of female clothing. On the outskirts of the town 
are dainty gardens which add not a little to the charm of the 
White City. 

All who idled the day ashore came back to the ship with the 
assurance that St. Michael's was a pleasant place. It seemed from 
the little they said that the secret of the charm was not to be 
found in the quaint Venetian boat harbour, nor about the ancient 
forts and walls, nor in the shades of the incense-scented churches, 
but that it had to do with something more subtle and unexpected. 
It was merely this, that after many months in the tropics — 
perhaps after many years — they had come upon things that 
reminded them of England. 

There was, in the first place, a clean, keen air, that brought 
with it memories of gusty chalk cliffs and gorse-covered downs. 
It was a white wind, alert and virile, shrewd as chill steel, a 
familiar wind the mere breathing of which was a nearly for- 
gotten joy. After the drugged, listless atmosphere that stews 
over the land of palms, it came as a welcome, satisfying draught 



374 THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 

Moreover there fell upon the nostrils the well-remembered smell 
of the good, brown earth, the savour of our English mother earth, 
the smell of the ploughed field and of the spade-turned garden. 
There is no such sense of the land in the alien tropics, rich as the 
soil may be and abundant as may be the rain. 

Delightful too, after many months, was the first sight of 
leafless trees bearing their strong limbs and their tingling 
branches to the kindly sky. After the extravagant, never-fading 
green of the South, this sight brought with it a great measure of 
relief, for persistent splendour is of all things the most wearisome. 
Fresh from the garish display of imperial-tinted flowers, it was 
like meeting with an old village friend to see once more the 
common nettle and a crop of dandelions. The Portuguese 
gardener who was proud to show a poor, marasmic palm, shivering 
in the open, was much surprised at the rapture these weeds 
produced, nor could he understand the joy which greeted a clump 
of ferns and a stretch of real grass — not Guinea grass nor Bahama 
grass — but the grass of the lawn and the open common. 

Then, again, on all sides were cottages with chimneys and the 
rare sight of smoke rising heavenwards, bringing with it the smell 
of burning wood, and the recollection, well-nigh blotted out, of 
firesides around which folk gather when the day is done. 

These pleasant sights touched a chord of memory, primitive 
enough it may be, yet precious to all whose homes lie in northern 
latitudes. In place of the florid poetry and gaudy romance of the 
Indies we had come unexpectedly upon lines from a spelling 
book, upon childish verses learnt in the nursery, upon " the sough 
of an old song." 



INDEX. 



Abercromby, Sir Ralph, 6, 99, 112, 

ii9> 131 
Aborigines of West Indies, 168, 241 {see 

also Caribs) 
Alabama, The, 162 
America and Amerigo, 64 

Columbus, 64 
American Mediterranean, loi 
Amerigo Vespucci, 65 
Anegada, 204 
Antigua, 55, 96, 104, 197 
Antilles, Greater, 103 

Lesser, 103 
Arawaks, 168 
Armida, Island of, 367 
Au Pr6cheur, 162 
Azores, The, 363, 3)56, 368, 372 • 



Bahamas, The, 169, 231 

Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 310 

Barbados, 2, 3, 7, 10, 12, 13, 17, 21, 49, 
96 
and St. Vincent eruption, 43 
Annexation of, 8 
George Washington at, 24 
Inhabitants of, 10, 28, 37, 40 
Leper asylum of, 13 
Lunatic asylum of, 14 
Planters of, 37 

Basse Terre, 179 

Bathsheba, 21, 42 

Benbow, Admiral, 289 

Bimini Islands, 231 

Birds of West Ind es, 34, 58, 60, 99, 167 

Black Beard, 208 

Bocas of Trinidad, 63, 94, 98 

Boiling Lake, 166 

Bois Immortel, 81 

Bonnet, Major Stede, 25, 209 

Bridgetown, 9, 11, 24 

Brimstone Hill, 180 

Buccaneers, The, 51, 257, 319 



Canal Zone, Panama, 308, 325, 326 
Sanitation of, 326 



Caribbean Sea, 10 1 

Caribbee Islands, 103 

Caribs, 108, no, in, 164, 168, 173, 179, 
234, 239, 241 

Carleil, General, 254, 350, 351 

Carlisle Bay, 7, 9 

Cartagena, City of, 355 

Drake at, 348, 350, 357 
Harbour of, 348, 357 
Storming of, 350, 352, 357 
Vernon at, 352, 357 

Casa Blanca, Puerto Rico, 230 

Casimir Delavigne, Song of, 130 

Castries, no, 112, 123 

Cayman, Grand, 102 

Chagres River, 311, 312, 326, 330 

Champlain, Samuel, 225, 340 

Charlotte Amalia, 205, 208 

Christophe, Henri I, 243 

Climate, 12, 56, 179, 309, 310, 312, 326, 

337, 373 
Codrington College, 19 
Colombia, 359 
Colon, 307, 325, 326 
Columbus, Christopher, 62, 95, 137, 164 
169, 204, 215, 230, 238, 
244, 248, 249, 307, 340 
First landing of, 169 
House of, 248 
Tomb of, 249 
Crab, Land, 35 
Cristobal, 308 
Crow of Barbados, 34 
Trinidad, 58 
Cruces, 311, 312, 317, 318, 327, 331, 336 
Cul de Sac Bay, 113, 114 
Culebra, 312 
Cumberland, Earl of, 165, 216, 223 



Dampier, si, 259, 319, 321, 331 

De Grasse, Admiral, 112, 138, 175, 277 

Derelict ships, 364 

D'Estaing, Admiral, 114 

Dessalines, 242 

Diablotin, 167 



376 



THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



Diamant Rock, 146 
Diamond Rock, H.M.S., 147 
Dominica, 34, 104, 162, 173, 175 

Battle of, 175, 277 
Drake, Sir Francis, 52, 165, 179, 216, 
217, 244, 251, 310, 313, 316, 

343. 357 
at Cartagena, 348, 350, 357 
at San Domingo, 244, 249, 251 
at San Juan, 218 
Death of, 346 
on the Isthmus, 310, 313, 316, 

336, 337, 345 
Drake's Spit, 348, 350, 357 
Du Casse, Admiral, 289, 290 
Duddely, or Duddeley, Robert, 8, 82 

Earthquake at Kingston, 267, 279, 285, 

289, 298 
-El Dorado, 57, 72, 95 
Empress Josephine, 141 
Espaiiola, 171, 238, 257, 263 



Fer de Lance, 125 

Fever, Yellow, 121, 224, 304, 3"j 353 

Fireflies, 59, 86 

Five Islands, Trinidad, 98 

Florida, loi 

Flying fish, 35 

Fort de France, 138, 142 

Fountain of Youth, 231 

French Revolution and West Indies, 130, 

242 
Frobisher, Martin, 251, 350, 352 

Gaspar Grande, 98 

Geography of West Indies, loi 

Gold Road, The, 309, 316, 331, 336 

Gorgas, Colonel, 326, 336 

Grand Etang, 107 

Grenada, 96, 106 

Grey, General, 112, 121, 142 

Gros Islet, no, 112, 115, 175 

Guadaloupe, 175 

Guiana, 73 

Gulf of Mexico, loi 

Paria, 57, 63, 64, 65, 94, 98 
Stream, 102, 363 



Hackelston's Cliff, 17 
Haiti, 171, 238, 243, 257, 263 
Hamilton, Alexander, 195 
Hawkins, Sir John, 217, 219, 244 
Death of, 219 
High Woods, Trinidad, 78 
Hispaniola {see EspaSola) 
Hole Town, 8, 22 
Holy Island, 64 



Hood, Admiral, 147 
Humming birds, 60 



Island of Eternal Youth, 23 1 

Island, The vanishing, 366 

Isthmus of Panama, 307, 310, 316, 325 



Jamaica, 267, 273, 279, 293 

Capture of, 271 
Jenkins' Ear, War of, 267, 340 
Johnny Crow, 58 
Josephine, Empress, 141 



KiDD, Captain, 263 
Kingston, 267, 279, 289, 294 

Earthquake at, 267, 279, 285, 
289, 298 



La Guayra, 363 

La Navidad, 238 

La Vigie, no, iii, 112, 114, 115 

Laventille Hill, 66 

Leeward Islands, 103 

Leprosy in West Indies, 13 



Manchineel, 22 

Manoa, City of, 73 

Marie Galante, 164, 175, 218 

Martinez, Juan, 73 

Martinique, 137, 142, 148, 1.58, 175 

Women of, 139 
Maynard, Lieut., 211 
Mona Island, 236 
Monmouth's Rebellion, 41, 191 
Mont Pel^ 144, 158 

Eruption of, 148, 150, 154 
Montserrat, 196 

Moore, Sir John, 112, 113, 191, 131 
Morgan, The Buccaneer, 259, 301, 312, 

313 
Morgan's Raid, 312, 313, 330, 335, 337 
Mome Diablotin, 104, 163 
Mome Fortune, no, in, 112, 113, 117, 

131 

Most Blessed Trinity, The, 50, 197, 339 
Mount Misery, 178, 180 
Mutiny at Trinidad, 70 



Negro huts, 12 

Negroes, 10, 28, 30, 125, 126, 130, 139, 

178, 241 
Nelson, Horatio, n, 22, 25, 95, 192, 300 
Nevis, 55, 96, 185, 187, 192 
Nombre de Dios, 311, 314, 316, 336, 345, 

347 



INDEX. 



377 



OjEDO, Alonso de, 65 

Olive Blossome, The, 7, 22, no 



Pacific Ocean, 310, 316, 327, 331 
Panama City, 311, 328 

Isthmus of, 307, 310, 316, 325 

Old, 330, 334 
Paria, Gulf of, 57, 63, 64, 65, 94, 98 
Pelican, 99 
Penn, Admiral, 271 
Perico Island, 52, 338 
Picton, Sir Thomas, 66, 112 
Pigeon Island, no, 120 
Pirates, 26, 51, 204, 208, 223, 257, 263, 

297, 316, 319. 339 
Pitch Lake, 75, 89 
Pitons, The, St. Lucia, 128 
Pizarro, 314, 337 
Planters, 37, 38, 183, 189 
Ponce de Leon, 227, 230 
Ponta Delgada, 372 
' Poor Whites' of Barbados, 40, 191 
Port Antonio, 273 
Porto Bello, 314, 336, 340, 343 

Admiral Vernon at, 340 
Taking of, 340 
Port of Spain, 57, 59, 66, 78 
Port Royal, 291, 293, 298, 303 
Puerto Colombia, 359 
Puerto Rico, 215, 223, 227, 230 



Qu'EST-ce qu'il dit bird, 60 



Raleigh, Sir Walt«r, 69, 72, 75, 89, 95 

Redonda, 196 

Revolution, French, in West Indies, 130, 

242 
Hoddatriy The, steamship, 127, 151 
Rodney, Admiral, no, 120, 138, 175, 

200, 277 
Roseau, 165 
Rupert, Prince, 204 



Saba, 181, 200 

Sabrina Shoal, 368 

Saints' Passage, 175 

San Domingo, 240, 244, 249, 251, 271 

Drake at, 244, 245, 249, 
251 
Sangre Grande, 79 
San Juan d'Ulloa, 217, 343 
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 215, 227, 230 
Cumberland at, 223 



San Juan, Drake at, 218 

San Salvador, 169 

SaiUa Maria, The, 170, 238 

Santo Domingo, 243 

Sargasso Sea, 363 

Sharp, Bartholomew, 51, 197, 320 

Slavery in West Indies, 29, 130, 241 

Sombrero, 104 

Soufriere, St. Lucia, 127, 128 

Spain and the West Indies, 171, 257 

Spanish Town, 274 

Sparrow, Barbadian, 35 

Statia, 181, 198 

St. Brandum, 366 

St. Christopher, 177, 183, 189 

St. Eustatius, 181, 198 

St. George's, Grenada, 106 

St. John's Church, Barbados, 18 

St. Joseph, 68, 76 

St. Kitts, 177, 183, 189 

St. Lucia, 109, 114, 117, 123, 131 

History of, no 
St. Michael's, 368, 372 
St. Pierre, 132, 144, 148, 154, 158 

Destruction of, 127, 150, 154 

Revolution at, 133 
St. Thomas, 204, 208 
St. Vincent, Eruption at, 48 
Sugar Bird, 35 



Teach, Edward, 27, 208 

Tick Bird, 60 

Tortuga, 260 

Tourists, Early, 3, 8, 82, 183, 223, 

225 
Toussaint Breda, 242 
Trinidad, 8, 56, 62, 6S, 78, 82, 267 

Bocas of, 63, 94, 98 

Discovery of, 62, 94 

High Woods of, 78 

Mutiny at, 70 

Pitch Lake of, 75, 89 

Taking of, 65, 99 
Trois Ilets, 141 



Vanishing Island, The, 366 
Venables, General, 271 
Venezuela, 56, 65, loi 
Vernon, Admiral, 340, 352, 357 
Vigo, 252 

Ville de Paris, The, 175, 277 
Virgin Islands, 204 



Wafkr, 51, 322 

War of Jenkins' Ear, 267, 340 



378 



THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP. 



Warnei, Thomas, 179, 180, 183, 196 

Washington, George, 24 

WaUing, John, 53 

Watling's Island, 169 

Wentworth, General, 352 

West Indies, Aborigines of, 168, 241 
Birds of, 34, 58, 60, 

167 
Climate of, 12, 56, 179 
Geography of, 10 1 
Leprosy in, 1 3 



99, 



West Indies, People of {see Negroes, 
Caribs, &c.) 
Planters of, 37, 183, 189 
Slavery in, 29, 130, 241 
Spain and the, 171, 257 
Strange animals of, 274 

Windward Islands, 103 



Yellow Fever, 121 224, 304, 311, 353 
Ysabel, 240 



Printed by Spottiswoode, Ballantyne (S» Co. Ltd. 
Colchester, London & Eton, England 



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